


Outlaws and Inlaws

by HermitLibrary_Archivist



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, meet the parents, mentions of past underage father/son incest, season/series 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-26
Updated: 2008-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-21 13:07:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4830185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HermitLibrary_Archivist/pseuds/HermitLibrary_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By Nova</p><p>Avon and Blake's relationship has reached the point where they have to meet the parents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outlaws and Inlaws

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Notes: For Ika and the Pink Triangles
> 
> This story takes place in an alternate universe that peels off after The Web.
> 
> Previously Published in Fire and Ice #7, ed. Kathleen Resch
> 
>  
> 
> Note from Judith and Aralias, the archivists: This story was originally archived at [Hermit.org Blake's 7 Library](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Hermit_Library), which was closed due to maintenance costs and lack of time. To preserve the archive, we began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2015. We posted announcements about the move and emailed authors as we imported, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Hermit.org Blake's 7 Library collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/hermitlibrary/profile). 
> 
> This work has been backdated to 26th of May 2008, which is the last date the Hermit.org archive was updated, not the date this fic was written. In some cases, fics can be dated more precisely by searching for the zine they were originally published in on [Fanlore](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Main_Page).

1\. The frontier planet's third sun was setting behind the silver dome of a Federation research station but the air was still thick with lemon-coloured light from its paired suns, suspended above the jagged grey mountain that faced the dome. Avon eased himself cautiously to the edge of a pock-marked slab of volcanic rock and peered down the mountainside. A line of men and women in olive coveralls - the labour force of prisoners who had just finished building the research station - wound through the maze of boulders below him, headed for a waiting spaceship. He turned to Blake, expecting the signal to move, but instead found him staring at the prisoners with a bemused, almost fearful expression.

'Blake?' he whispered, touching the other man's arm to attract his attention. 'Roj, what's the matter?'

Muscles twanged under Avon's palm. When he looked closer, he saw a sheen of sweat glossing Blake's face. 'That man and woman at the end of the line,' he muttered, still staring. 'They're my parents.'

Avon's eyes narrowed, straining against the acid glare: a purely reflex action, since he would hardly have been able to identify any family resemblances from that height. He contemplated saying, 'I thought your parents were dead' but he had never liked stating the obvious. 

**I can leave that to Vila. And besides, Blake should know.**

'All right,' he said, assimilating the information with his usual speed. 'This calls for a change of plan. Come on, Vila.'

A theatrical sigh eddied towards him as Vila elbowed through the gap between Blake and the rock face, stuffing a pack of cards into his pocket. 'I was just going to cheat myself at Patience,' he complained. 'Can't a man ever get any peace around here? Why me?' 

'Because we are about to rescue two Federation prisoners and you are wearing a Federation uniform. I assume you can make the connection between those facts.'

'So? Blake's in uniform too.'

'Ah, but these prisoners are Blake's parents, which presupposes that they are intractable liberals, if not outright revolutionaries. Either way, they are unlikely to react favourably to the sight of their son in Federation blacks.' 

'What's an intractable liberal, when it's -?' Vila began and Avon snarled, 'Hurry, fool! We don't have time to waste on political discussion.'

He gripped Blake's hand and then released it, unholstered his blaster and set off down the hillside under cover of a stony ridge. Vila caught up a few seconds later, jogging along behind him.

'Wait a minute,' he whispered. 'I thought Blake's mum and dad were dead.'

Avon smiled. **There, I knew I could rely on Vila for the appropriate banality.** 'So the Federation told Blake,' he replied. 'But here they are.'

'Parents,' Vila mused, as he dodged a spiny bush. 'I had one of them once, a long time ago. Well, two, I suppose, except I wouldn't recognise my dad if I fell over him in a Federation holding cell - which I may've done from time to time, come to think of it. Still, they say that people who grow up round their parents tend to get attached to them, so it'd be a nice gesture, saving Blake's mum and dad. Any idea of how we're going to go about it?'

'Why don't we just trust our luck? That seems a suitably Blakean strategy.'

Vila winced. 'Actually, I might trust your luck, Avon,' he decided. 'Mine's been wearing a bit thin lately.'

As it turned out, the rescue was easier than either of them anticipated. They ducked across the track, skidded down a shale slope and squeezed between two standing stones, emerging at the next bend in the path just in time to intercept the three Federation troopers who were guarding the final batch of prisoners. While Vila fanned his blaster in a casual semi-circle, Avon scanned the group and pointed to a tall thickset man and the small round woman beside him.

'We need two labourers to carry some equipment you idiots left behind,' he snapped. 'They'll do.' 

Five seconds later, they were herding their prisoners back up the track towards the research station. Avon kept an eye on the guards until they turned the corner but the three men didn't even bother to look around.

**Marvellous what an air of authority can achieve. Let's see whether it works equally well on Blake's parents.**

As they reached the rocky outcrop that marked the beginning of the ridge, he halted and said, 'I should inform you that we are not, in fact, Federation troopers. Your son is waiting in the hills. If you leave the path here and -'

Before he could finish the sentence, the small woman was tilting her head back to glare up at him. 'Oh no, we aren't quite that gullible,' she snapped. 'If you want to shoot us, you can do it right here, where they'll find our bodies. Maybe some of your precious scientists will think twice about the system they're supporting, if they see what it costs in human lives.'

She bristled and puffed her chest out, like a bantam confronting a fox. Avon, gazing down into a pair of devastatingly familiar hazel eyes, found himself temporarily silenced. At his side Vila shuffled and cleared his throat. 

'He means it, you know,' he said earnestly. 'Roj Blake's a friend of ours, honest. We came down to blow up that place you've been working on, only Blake saw you, so we decided we'd better rescue you first. It'd be nice if you could believe us straight off, because me and Avon ought to get a move on, before they start shipping the scientists in.' 

For some reason, Vila's random babbling seemed to have more effect than rational explanation. At any rate, the small woman breathed, soft and questioning, 'Roj? Roj is here,' while the tall man gnawed his thumb and murmured, 'A strange lie for a pair of Federation executioners to choose. I think we might risk believing them', as though he were talking to himself.

That seemed close enough to assent. Avon raised his hand in a signal and watched Blake scramble to his feet - little more than a distant smudge against the hillside but Avon could recognise the tension in his stance. Blake's parents took one look at the shadowy figure and turned away without another word, helping each over the first ridge of basalt and filing along the stony track with the unconscious precision of sleepwalkers. Avon watched them for half a minute and then jerked his head at Vila, who blinked and rubbed his eyes.

'You sure we shouldn't stay and help them up the hill?' he said wistfully. 'I wouldn't mind a front seat at a family reunion.'

Avon hitched at the tube of explosive devices slung over his shoulder. 'Curb your sentiment,' he told Vila. 'We have a job to do.'

So they did it, planting the explosives at regular intervals throughout the dome and then teleporting back to the Liberator where, to Vila's obvious delight, the family reunion was still in full swing. Cally, Gan and Jenna clustered in a benevolent semi-circle around Blake, who was canted at an alarming angle, one arm hooked over his father's shoulder, the other arm reaching down to embrace his mother. They swayed together, still too dazed with emotion to say anything more than variants on 'You're alive' and 'The Federation claimed you were dead' and 'Oh god, so they were telling the truth about Jak and Meirion' - Blake's brother and sister, as Avon recalled: the rumours of their deaths had clearly not been exaggerated. He halted at the outer edge of the circle, hooding his eyes and folding his hands in front of him.

'Objective achieved,' he reported in his driest tones. 'The dome is now a kilometre-deep crater. The Federation will have to find another site for their research station.'

Blake's mother broke away from the group embrace and took a step towards him. 'Thank you,' she said fiercely. 'Well done.'

Avon shrugged. 'There is no need to thank me. I am not the resident hothead.'

'Nah, he's the resident bucket of cold water,' Vila cut in. 'Which reminds me, I could use a drink right now. After all, we've got a lot to celebrate - reducing the dome to rubble and finding Blake's folks.'

He beamed at the family tableau and headed for the door. Blake overtook him in two strides and swung him back. 'Not so fast, Vila,' he said. 'Let me introduce everyone first. These are my parents, Gwyneth and Huw Blake. My crew - Vila Restal, Jenna Stannis, Cally and Olag Gan.' He paused to wrestle his smile back into manageable proportions, then grasped Avon's elbow and urged him forward, adding proudly, 'And this is my lover, Kerr Avon.' 

For a moment Avon genuinely believed that the temperature on board the Liberator had dropped. He was about to go and investigate when he identified the waft of icy disapproval emanating from Blake's mother. She let out a tiny wail, like a disappointed kitten. 

'Roj, no!' she protested. 'What on earth do you mean?' 

Side by side, Roj and Huw Blake frowned, lifted their hands in perfect synchrony and bit down on their thumb knuckles. Avon's mouth twitched. But his sense of humour, cultivated to help him through his own family gatherings, seemed out of place here, so he disciplined his face into its customary mask and launched a social smile in Gwyneth's general direction.

'Perhaps we should leave the celebrations until later,' he suggested smoothly. 'Blake, your parents must be exhausted. Why don't you show them to one of the vacant cabins?' 

He twisted a hand into the back of Vila's jacket. At the same moment Cally, always intuitive, linked arms with Jenna and Gan. Between them, they hustled the others across to the corridor, leaving Blake and his parents alone on the flight deck.

'What was all that about?' Vila said plaintively, as Avon steered him towards the recreation room.

'Well, I hope I'm wrong,' Jenna said, falling into step, 'but I got the impression that Blake's parents don't approve of homosexuals.'

'Homosexuals? Where?' Vila asked, startled. 

Cally said, 'Oh, Vila!', Jenna kicked his ankle and Gan heaved a patient sigh. Vila covered his face with both hands, peeking out through a crack between the fingers. 

'Sorry, Avon,' he groaned. 'The thing is, I'm so used to you and Blake by now that I'd forgotten.'

'Never mind,' Avon said with a backward glance at the flight deck. 'If you forget again, I am sure Blake's mother will be happy to remind you.'

 

*

 

Three hours later Blake lurched into the recreation room, leaning on Jenna's shoulder. Gan was perched on the couch beside Cally, his big hands held half a metre apart so she could wind a skein of Kairan silk around them, and Avon was playing mah jongg with Vila, using the antique ivory and wood tiles that Blake had given him. Blake stared at him intently but he refused to look up.

**I knew it. Avon's angry with me too. It looks as though I'm under attack from all sides, as usual.**

When he continued to hover irresolutely by the door, Cally raised compassionate eyes towards him. 'They can't help it,' Blake said, half-defensive and half-pleading, talking to her but keeping his gaze fixed on Avon. 'My parents lived on a farming planet all their lives, until the Federation caught up with them. In general, their ideas are extremely progressive but like most farmers, they still tend to think in terms of ...' 

'Breeding,' Jenna completed with a shudder. 'I know. Couldn't get away from my home planet fast enough.' 

'You come from one of the redneck planets too?' Vila said, surprised. 'That explains why you and Blake get on so well. I can see it in him but I never would've guessed about you.' 

Jenna smoothed an infinitesimal crease from skintight satin trousers. 'We all have our secrets,' she murmured. 'And it looks as though your parents have just discovered one of yours, Blake.' 

'It wasn't a secret,' he protested. 'I haven't seen my parents since I left Cymry IV to work on the Aquitar Project. At that point I hadn't realised I was gay, so there was nothing to tell. Still, I assumed my parents would be as liberal about homosexuality as they are about everything else.' 

'But apparently they are not,' Avon said, glancing up. 

Vila ducked instinctively and the skein of silk twanged between Gan's hands. When Avon returned to contemplating a row of red, white and green dragons, Blake slumped against the wall, caught in a vortex of giddy tiredness, more powerful than the pull of a black hole. An awkward interval of silence was broken by the clack of Jenna's boot heels, as she strode across to the kaff machine. 

'By the way, Blake,' she said over her shoulder, 'would you ask your mother to stop matchmaking?' 

Vila sniggered. 'Just tell her you tried hard, then settled for Gan,' he suggested. 

'Oh, shut up, Vila,' Cally said, unexpectedly stern. 

She whisked the skein away and released Gan, who patted her knee and smiled. 'That's all right, Cally,' he said placidly. 'I know I was Jenna's second choice.'

' And a much more sensible choice too,' Jenna said, forthright as ever. 'Although I don't suppose I can expect Blake's mother to agree with that. She'll have to get used to it, though. Call her off, Blake.' 

'I'll do my best,' he said wearily. 'But I warn you, my mother's very strong-willed. She's exhausted me. I think I might go to bed now.'

He turned back to Avon with a look that was intended to be appealing but came close to desperate. Since desperation didn't normally cut it with Avon, Blake was both startled and relieved when he shrugged and rose to his feet. 

'Sleep well,' Vila told them, adding irrepressibly, 'unless Blake's mum comes knocking at your door.' 

He grinned at Avon, who shuddered ostentatiously. 'Thank you, Vila,' he said. 'That thought was all I needed to make my day complete.'

He followed Blake out of the room and they walked down the corridor in silence, although this time the silence seemed more like a truce. After a while Blake let their hands brush casually together, holding his breath until he felt Avon's fingers slot into his. He almost dragged Avon the rest of the way, shunting him into his cabin and drawing him straight into an engulfing kiss. That was, evidently, a little too desperate for Avon's liking. He inserted both hands into the narrow gap between their bodies and gave Blake a peremptory shove.

'Easy, Blake,' he said. 'Would you mind explaining why you've chosen to turn a minor social contretemps into a three act tragedy?'

'Isn't it obvious?' Blake growled. 'I've just discovered that my parents escaped the Federation executioners through a bureaucratic error - apparently, they'd already been interned during a purge of rebel sympathisers, so the relevant data-puncher marked them down as dead. But instead of seeing our reunion as something to celebrate, my mother keeps alternating between stony silence, reproachful sighs and heroically suppressed tears ... all because she doesn't like my choice of lovers.'

His mouth twisted, as if he'd bitten into something sour, and he sat down heavily on the bed. He was still trying to decide whether he was more upset by his mother's disapproval or by the knowledge that he was upsetting her, when a shadow blocked the light and he looked up to find Avon standing over him. There was a faint vertical crease between his eyebrows, like the mark left by a thumbnail. 

'You expect a lot from your family, don't you?' he observed.

'Of course I do,' Blake snapped. 'We're talking about my mother, Avon.' 

Avon blinked. 'Yes, I'm aware of that,' he said politely. 

'It's a special kind of relationship,' Blake persevered, searching for words to explain the obvious. When Avon continued to look puzzled, he said in a clumsy attempt at humour, 'You did have a mother, didn't you?' 

'Oh yes,' Avon confirmed. 'However, the words "special relationship" don't evoke any fond memories, possibly because I rarely saw my mother and therefore have little to remember.' His eyes narrowed into feral slits as he added, 'And please, don't start feeling sorry for me, Roj. You are already fully occupied by feeling sorry for yourself.'

Blake let his head drop into his hands. 'You think that's unreasonable?' he asked in a muffled voice. 'I don't. It's quite a shock to find out that my parents are homophobic.'

The mattress jolted. Avon settled behind him, knees braced against Blake's hips, hands massaging his shoulders, brisk but soothing. 'I warned you about this,' he said. 'It is easy enough to decide you are homosexual on a spaceship of which you are the unofficial commander. Rather more difficult when faced with the usual planetary prejudices.' 

He dug his thumbs into a knotted muscle and Blake used that as an excuse to groan out loud. 'But my parents aren't usually prejudiced,' he said. 'It seems so ... illogical.'

'Not really,' Avon told him, leaning forward to slide his hands down Blake's chest and unbutton his shirt. 'This galaxy is still comparatively underpopulated and the Federation only controls half the civilised worlds, which gives them a vested interest in promoting reproductive relationships.' He whisked the shirt over Blake's head, pushed him down onto the bed and straddled him, saying, 'Conversely, since the increased radiation levels on spaceships mean that pregnancy is contraindicated, spacer culture is inherently more tolerant of homosexuality. You have, up until now, been shielded from reality, my dear.' 

Blake yelped at the cool touch of oil trickling down his spine, then scowled into the pillow. 'You're very calm about all of this,' he said resentfully. 'Doesn't that kind of bigotry make you even slightly angry?' 

Avon laughed. 'My sexuality was relatively low on my family's list of reasons for disapproving of me,' he said, spreading the oil across Blake's back with quick firm strokes. 'It was, in some ways, a relief to find a label that defined my difference. I am not a crusader for queerdom, Blake. If it helps, I would be happy to downplay our relationship while your parents are here.'

'No, thank you,' Blake said indignantly. 'I can't stop them judging me but I'm damned if I'll let myself be silenced.' 

'Very well then,' Avon sighed. 'By all means, go ahead and flaunt your sexual preference at your parents. Just remember that my offer still stands. 

His voice sounded tetchy but his hands continued to ease the tension from Blake's muscles. After a while Blake swivelled round and pulled Avon down beside him. He butted his head into a convenient hollow on Avon's shoulder and sheltered there until the soothing hands persuaded him to release the tears he'd been trying to suppress. Avon held him while he gulped and hawked and snuffled, kissed him ruthlessly when he attempted to apologise and tucked him back into the convenient hollow. Blake snuggled closer, hiding a secret smile.

**When it comes to saving face, Avon's always been an expert. It's nice to know he's as concerned to safeguard my pride as his own.**

 

*

 

After Blake had fallen asleep on his shoulder, Avon lay awake for another hour, staring at the darkness and anticipating trouble. His instincts proved accurate. Over the next few days, Gwyneth Blake's attempts to pair her son with Jenna accelerated to the level of self-parody. Embarrassed on her behalf, Avon did his best to stay out of her way but whenever they were obliged to share the same space, Gwyneth twitched and jumped and glanced nervously over her shoulder, like an ailurophobe who suspects there is a cat in the room. It was unexpectedly depressing. Long before they'd become lovers, he had fallen into a half-acknowledged habit of shadowing Blake and touching Blake, whenever circumstances allowed, but under Gwyneth's monitoring gaze, even the most casual contact seemed more like defiance than reassurance. So Avon volunteered for the night watch and began to invent projects that required him to spend increasing amounts of time alone, researching the Liberator's systems. 

He was in the computer room, investigating the flight predictor, when Blake stormed in, with such majestic speed and fury that Avon felt as though a minor cyclone had buffeted him away from the navigation computer and flung him at the nearest wall, knocking the breath out of him. Blake's hands, heavy on his shoulders, and Blake's mouth, urgent on his mouth, provided a more prosaic explanation. Still unnerved at times by Blake's directness, Avon turned his head aside, hoping to disengage himself for long enough to assert his control of the situation. But Blake had already wrenched his trousers open; Blake's hand was already plunging in to seize his cock. He enveloped the shaft and thumbed the hood, locating the most sensitive spots with an assurance that was as erotic as its consequences. Avon gasped, leaned back and let the approaching orgasm thrust him into the eye of the storm, lifting him and dropping him and hurling him hard against Blake's chest.

Some time later he summoned the energy required to straighten his buckled knees, slide his spine up the wall and look Blake in the eye. 'So your parents have been badgering you again?' he asked, smiling faintly.

Blake's eyes wavered and refocused. As he ran a quick scan down Avon's ruffled hair, bruised mouth and disordered clothing, his teeth sank into the full curve of his lower lip. 

'You're right, of course,' he apologised. 'I'm taking it out on you. Do you mind?'

Avon's smile broadened. 'As a matter of fact, I like it,' he said. 'It's possible to appreciate a good fuck and still feel curious about its provenance.' He ran a finger down Blake's chest, pausing to toy with the first button on his shirt, and added, 'More propaganda about the evils of homosexuality, I suppose?'

Blake made a stifled sound, halfway between a snort and a whimper. 'My mother's persuaded Orac to track down all the Federation studies that prove queers are immature, promiscuous and self-hating. She passes them on to me for my bedtime reading.' He watched Avon bisect his shirt with surgical precision and tweak at his nipples, then captured his hands and said abruptly, 'Kerr, don't give up on my parents, not yet. I'm the only child they have left, so I'm carrying a triple load of expectations at present. But I'm sure they'll learn to like you, once they get to know you.'

Avon's smile mutated into something more wry and wary. 'I think not,' he murmured but Blake clutched his hands in mute appeal, so he sighed and said, 'Never mind, I'm prepared to humour you. I assume you locked the door behind you, when you barged in?' 

'I'm not as rash as you think,' Blake grumbled. 'I can remember to take elementary precautions.'

'Good,' Avon said and sank to his knees, pulling his hands free and reaching for the clasp on Blake's belt.

Blake's cock strained towards him, already thrusting at the air - apparently without its owner's conscious volition, because Blake cursed mildly and lounged back against the wall, elaborately casual. Avon caught a pearly drop on the tip of his tongue and rolled it across his palate, taking a moment to savour the bitter familiar taste, before he steadied the shaft between his palms and guided it into his mouth. Blake lunged convulsively, then muttered an apology and disciplined his hips into an almost imperceptible rocking motion. Avon rounded his tongue to cushion the shaft and caress it with long lapping strokes, closing his eyes and letting the world contract to a darkly private space where he could read Blake's reactions in the pulsations of his cock, swelling and trembling, spasming and gushing. 

As the first warm spurt hit the back of his throat, a split-second frisson of panic rippled down Avon's spine, claustrophobia edged with an aura of vulnerability. And then, without pausing to reflect, he was gulping thick tangy liquid and swallowing greedily, because he was safe here: because this was Blake. He sat back on his heels and looked up, wiping a flamboyant hand across his mouth. Blake was gazing at him with the dazzled awe he usually reserved for heroes of the resistance or street conjurors.

'Oh, Avon,' he whispered. 'It's been six months and we still can't get enough of each other. I hope that never changes.'

Avon knotted a hand in Blake's shirt and hauled himself upright. 'Yes, well,' he said, as he kissed Blake in passing, 'one can always hope.'

 

*

 

Blake stumbled into his cabin just before midnight, collapsed onto the bed and lay there without moving or thinking. After a while he tried to urge himself into the shower but there didn't seem to be much point, given that he was unlikely to have any late night visitors - that is, unless his mother turned up to pimp for Jenna again. His mouth hitched into a humourless smile. It was ironic, really. A fortnight ago, he'd had a lover and happy memories of his parents. Now his mother had turned into a mouthpiece for the Federation's anti-queer propaganda ... and Avon hadn't come near him for the past week. 

Oh well, he'd never expected it to last. Avon had resisted him strenuously, right from the beginning. Then, after they escaped the Web, he'd cornered Blake on the flight deck and interrogated him for half an hour about his reasons for handing over the energy rods when Saymon's humanoids tortured Avon with a shock stick. Blake had been defensive, to begin with, convinced that Avon was trying to make him admit he'd gone against his revolutionary principles by protecting one of his crew members, instead of holding out for a deal that would save the Decimas. 

Although, when he finally confessed that he simply couldn't bear to see Avon hurt, Avon had just said, 'Then thank you,' and leaned forward to kiss him on the mouth. 

Nothing more than a light, swift touch from lips that felt unexpectedly warm and yielding but the implicit invitation had been a bigger surprise than Bran Foster's revelations about his past life in the Freedom Party. At first, it had seemed like a purely intellectual puzzle. **Avon? The man with the cast iron boundaries? Did** Avon **actually kiss me?** But seconds later Blake realised he was rationalising a response that had been completely physical, an awareness so strong that he could still feel the imprint of Avon's lips on his. He stared at Avon, simultaneously alarmed and elated. 

'I've been very stupid, haven't I?' he whispered.

'Either you have or I have,' Avon replied. 

He stared back, obdurately expressionless. Blake flinched, suddenly afraid that Avon was about to withdraw his invitation - although in retrospect, it occurred to him that Avon had probably been referring to the risks involved in making a pass at another man. At the time, however, he just reached out impulsively and caught hold of Avon's hand.

'Would you do that again?' he asked. 

Avon hesitated, then shrugged. 'Why not?' he said.

His lips brushed across Blake's lips, aligned and settled. Blake shuddered and sighed. No question about his reaction this time. His entire body was instantly engaged - skin tingling, nerves throbbing, cock standing to attention, arms folding round Avon and pulling him close. Avon laughed suddenly and wedged his knee between Blake's thighs, tilted him back against the seat and thrust his tongue into Blake's mouth. He sucked hard, drawing Avon's tongue deeper, while his hands slithered busily across fine-weave cotton, memorising the planes of Avon's back.

It was overwhelming. Too much data to process: touch, taste, sound, sight, smell. Too much that he wanted to do: explore Avon's mouth, discover the texture of Avon's hair, find out what would happen if he moved this way and then that way and nudged his erection into the hollow of Avon's groin. Apparently, while his conscious mind had concentrated on arguing politics and tactics with Avon, Blake had subconsciously been compiling lists of erotic possibilities. Now he was floundering ridiculously, one minute spreading his legs wide to fit Avon against him, next minute shaken by a jolt of confused sensation that almost pushed Avon away. It would have been embarrassing, if Avon hadn't been assailing him with equal fervour, riding Blake's thigh as he reared, bearing down when Blake caved and all the time systematically ravishing Blake's mouth with a sequence of soft/hard kisses that destroyed his previous certainties and then remade them, into something simpler and more certain than he had ever known. 

Some time later Avon's hand slid inside his shirt, to find and tease his nipples. Blake twitched as galvanically as if the fingers had been electrodes and wrenched himself out of reach.

'Not if you want this to last,' he explained breathlessly.

He hooked an arm across the back of the seat, grinning as he noticed that they seemed to have swapped places at some point in the last few minutes. When he looked up, Avon's eyes were shining with a fierce glaze, like a predator in mid-hunt. Blake touched his cheek and watched the eyes cloud and clear, gradually resuming their habitual detachment.

'After waiting so long, I would prefer something more memorable than a brief tussle on a couch,' Avon agreed. 'Your cabin or mine?' 

Blake stretched lazily. 'I don't want to move,' he said, reaching for Avon, who frowned and shrugged his hand away. 

'We have been lucky so far,' he warned. 'But every second increases the likelihood that one of the others will walk in on us.' 

'Is that a problem?' Blake asked, genuinely curious. 'Why should they care?'

'Gan comes from a farming planet,' Avon reminded him. 'Vila is a Delta and while Deltas are, in practice, more tolerant than farmers, they consider queers to be **de facto** women and, therefore, second class citizens. Jenna is in love with you, which would hardly predispose her towards acceptance ... and who knows how the Auronar feel about homosexuality?' 

Blake laughed. 'You've made quite a study of them,' he commented.

'Haven't you?' Avon asked, slanting an eyebrow at him. 'It seems a sensible precaution - although on second thoughts, that may explain why you've neglected it.' He rose abruptly, smoothing his tunic, and added, 'Enough, Blake. I was contemplating a seduction, not a debate on the topic of homophobia.' 

He turned and strode off, so Blake heaved himself to his feet and followed, overtaking Avon halfway down the corridor and propelling him into his cabin. Avon used the momentum to swing Blake round, pin him to the wall and press full length against him. Blake flattened his palms on the slippery plass, suddenly unable to stand without support. The second onslaught of desire was even more devastating than the first, accelerating his pulse and glossing his skin with sweat. When Avon began to mark a line of soft-mouthed bites down his throat, he tipped his head back to expose himself more completely. 

'Oh, very nice,' Avon approved, completing the sequence. 'You like that, do you? What else do you like?' 

'I don't know,' Blake said frankly. 'I've never done this before.' 

A fractional pause and then cool air rushed in on him, congealing the heat of his skin. 'Ah,' Avon said, stepping back a pace. 'As it happens, I'm not in the habit of seducing virgins. Do you want to reconsider?'

'No!' Blake yelled, panicking. 'You can't stop now.'

He seized Avon's hand and cupped it round the bulge of his erection, sighing as inquisitive fingers traced the shape of the stiffening shaft. Avon favoured him with a nova-bright smile. 

'True,' he admitted. 'It seems I can't stop.'

Blake sighed with relief. Before Avon could come up with another reason to renege, he shucked his clothes off and scrambled into the bed. Avon strolled across to the desk, hanging his tunic on Blake's chair and then adding the rest of his garments, one by one, in a slow progression that incorporated a tantalising element of display. By the time he turned, Blake was shivering with anticipation. He bit down on his lip and stared wide-eyed at Avon's cock, awed and reverent as a knight who had achieved a vision of the grail. 

Naked, Avon seemed more relaxed than Blake had ever seen him. He lingered for a moment, one hand resting on the chair and the other on his hip, letting Blake's eyes caress his cock until it swelled and strained higher. Then he crossed the room, pelvis tilting in the slightest of swaggers, slid under the sheet and surveyed Blake, still smiling. Blake's heart constricted and filled. He watched his hand rise of its own accord, splay wide and close around Avon's shaft. On first contact it felt like marble sheathed in warm chamois leather but within seconds it came alive, butting into the funnel of his fist. Avon gasped.

'You're very forward, for a virgin,' he said dryly.

'I wish you'd stop using that word,' Blake complained. 'It isn't technically accurate. I slept with a number of women during my time in the Freedom Party. Not a very large number, I admit - I always thought sex was an overrated activity, although I'm finally starting to see what all the fuss was about.'

'Oh, are you, now?' Avon murmured. 'If that's how you feel after a kiss and a quick grope, it should be interesting to see how you react to more direct stimulation.'

He stretched out, leaning into Blake and running a hand down his side. Close contact with a naked male body completed the process begun by Avon's kiss on the flight deck. Blake fell back onto the pillows, startled all over again by his sense of recognition and belonging. The women he'd slept with had ranged from tall to tiny, full-breasted to boyish, but none of them had inspired this kind of instantaneous fervour. Every cell in his cock - hell, every cell in his entire body - seemed to have dilated to bursting point. Blake felt as though he might have flown apart, if Avon hadn't been been monitoring his responses with impersonal efficiency, curbing him when he reached the limits of his endurance and steering him back to safer territory. He found himself welcoming Avon's detachment, even while he resented it.

**Oh well, at least one of us knows what he's doing.**

For a while he drifted in a haze of generalised rapture, only aware of specific sensations when Avon nibbled his ear lobe or kissed the creases at the back of his knees or traced the patterns of bulging veins along his shaft. Then, without any advance warning, his hips jerked violently and lifted off the bed. Avon supported him with an arm round his shoulders, while his other hand pumped Blake's cock, identifying the precise way to channel Blake's pent-up desire until it exploded with an intensity that was almost painful. Blake shuddered and yelled and collapsed. Some time later he registered a ripple of movement against his side and lifted his head to see Avon gazing down at him, masturbating pensively. He swallowed hard, recognising a new kind of craving. 

'Please, let me do that,' he said urgently. 

He swivelled round and bent over Avon's cock, sighing with satisfaction as he took the glistening head into his mouth. A sharp hiss of breath confirmed that Avon hadn't anticipated this particular move. Blake chuckled quietly, then filed Avon's response to the vibrations for future reference. He stretched his jaw wide, hollowing his tongue and engulfing the shaft. As the cockhead nudged the back of his throat, he paused to savour the sensation of being filled to capacity. 

**An unlikely sort of activity, objectively speaking ... but it's what my mouth was made for. Dear god, I feel happy. I'd almost forgotten what it was like. But I'm happy now.** 

He drew in a long breath, deliberately channelling the air along Avon's shaft. Then he played with his new toy for a while, rolling it between tongue and palate, sucking on the head, painting delicate tongue-tip lattices across the underside. Avon murmured and writhed and drew his knees up, grinding his hips into the mattress.

'A little harder,' he advised. 'Oh yes, that's perfect,' and then, a few seconds later, 'Blake, I can't hold out much longer. Since you're a novice in these matters, I'd suggest switching to manual stimulation at this point.'

Blake shook his head obstinately, vibrating the shaft. An involuntary groan escaped from Avon's lungs and his cock pulsed faster. Blake braced his arms and moved in steady counterpoint to Avon's thrusts, finding the rhythm by instinct, while at the same time his engineer's brain graphed the spaces of his mouth and throat and invented methods for taking Avon even deeper. 

Next time. Next time. 

And then, too soon for Blake's liking, Avon's cock stalled and jerked and spurted, flooding his palate, filling him even more completely. Blake swallowed until he had absorbed the last viscous drops. As he lifted his head, Avon smiled and stretched languorously.

'You have a natural talent for fellatio, Blake,' he said. 'Are you sure it's your first time? After all, your memory's not entirely reliable.' 

'I'd remember this,' Blake said with fervent certainty. 'It's the best thing that ever happened to me.' 

He flung himself onto the pillows, as charged with adrenalin as he'd been after his first Freedom Party raid, reliving the risks, desperate to do it all over again. Avon's eyes darkened, their glint of mockery eclipsed by a shadow that Blake might have identified as envy, if he'd been able to imagine Avon envying anyone. 

'You're a strange man, Roj Blake,' he observed. 'But you have your moments. Don't look so serious. This was meant to be recreational, not earth-shattering.' 

He leaned forward to kiss Blake on the mouth - another light swift touch, like a ritual of closure. Then he pushed himself upright and swung his feet to the floor. Blake's hand shot out and clamped round Avon's wrist. 

'Where are you going?' he asked. 

'Back to my cabin. Where else?' Avon said, mildly puzzled. 

'Now?' Blake demanded. 'Do you usually walk out on your partners straight after making love?' 

'Since this is your cabin, you are hardly in a position to leave,' Avon pointed out. He frowned down at his wrist and said, even more puzzled, 'Do you want me to stay?' 

Blake's grip tightened. 'What do you think?' he said brusquely. 

Avon arched his eyebrows, eliding the frown. 'Very well,' he said. 'If you insist.' 

He settled back and fell asleep with disconcerting suddenness, as though he'd flicked an Off switch. Blake propped himself on one elbow and watched the dreaming flicker of Avon's eyelids, until his own eyes insisted on closing. Next morning, when he surfaced from an unexpectedly sound sleep, Avon had gone. Blake stood beside the bed for a few minutes, studying the dent in the second pillow, while he catalogued his memories of the previous night and assessed his new certainties. 

**Gay rights as a non-negotiable item on the revolutionary agenda? Hmm. This promises to be more immediately rewarding than most of the things I've done for the cause.** 

He dressed speedily, collected two mugs of tea from the galley and found Avon on the flight deck, mending a circuit board. 'So that's where you disappeared to,' he said cheerfully, as he placed a mug at Avon's elbow and bent to kiss the nape of his neck. 

Avon froze, then recoiled. It was the first time Blake had ever seen him completely without defences, his face blanked by shock - but very revealing, for all that. Within seconds, however, he had recovered enough to exchange the shocked blankness for a vicious glare. 

'Have you lost the few wits you possess, Blake?' he spat. 'What makes you think I'd welcome -?' 

Blake grinned. 'That's right, you're working,' he cut in blandly. 'Never mind, I can wait until ...'

Before he could finish the sentence, the flight deck emptied. Gan muttered something about elevenses; Cally said, 'Jenna, I think we should continue our inventory of the medical supplies' and Vila frankly bolted. Blake examined the defensive set of black-clad shoulders, hunched over the circuit board. 

'Well, Avon?' he said eventually. 'Any chance of an explanation?' 

Avon wrenched at a filament, which snapped. 'Damn you, Blake,' he said softly. 'Have you no sense of self-preservation? Must you insist on broadcasting your affairs to the rest of the world?' 

'Why not?' Blake asked. 'I didn't realise you cared so much about other people's opinions.' 

'I don't,' Avon said with a return of his usual arrogance. 'On the other hand, I see no reason to go out of our way to provoke hostility, in exchange for one night together.' 

'One night?' Blake echoed. 'When did we decide that?'

Avon laughed. 'I keep forgetting how inexperienced you are,' he remarked. 'It's hardly something one needs to discuss, Blake. Believe me, I have rarely slept with the same partner more than twice.' 

'But I don't want to sleep with you twice,' Blake told him. 

In the silence that followed, Avon met his eyes for the first time since he had walked out onto the flight deck, startled into a direct response, wounded against his will. Blake reached out and ran a reassuring finger down his cheek.

'Twice wouldn't be anywhere near enough,' he said. 'I want to sleep with you as often as possible.' 

Avon turned his head away, a fraction too slowly to conceal a transient look of relief. 'How flattering,' he said in his driest tones. 'Or rather, it might be flattering, if you had any basis for comparison.'

'Really?' Blake said, scowling. 'So you think I can't know what I want, until I've fucked my way round the galaxy?'

'Your future choices are none of my business,' Avon said silkily. 'However, I'd suggest that, in this case, you are drawing inappropriate conclusions from one isolated incident. I am glad you enjoyed our little encounter, Blake, but I advise you to consider carefully, before deciding you are queer.'

'Too late,' Blake said. 'I am queer. I know that now - and I know I want you. What do you want, Avon?'

In response, Avon snatched up a probe and began to lever at the damaged filament. 'I would like to be left alone, so that I can concentrate on my work,' he announced.

Blake smiled down at the top of Avon's head and traced a swirl of coffee-coloured hair with his fingertip. 'Fair enough,' he said, turning away. 'I've got work to do myself. We can discuss this again later on.'

He'd expected to wait several days before making his next move. But that night Avon had arrived at his cabin door, austerely splendid in a long black brocade dressing gown.

'All right,' he said fiercely, before Blake had time to look surprised. 'All right, Blake, you win. You are as naively idealistic about this as you are about everything else. But apparently naivete is contagious.' 

He stalked into the cabin and spun round, arrogant and wary. Blake stared disbelievingly, then yanked him into an urgent embrace. His hands skidded down the brocade, searching for buttons but finding a complicated twist of fabric. He fumbled clumsily, until Avon laughed and guided his finger to the central knot. 

'A Chinese puzzle,' he said, pushing the knot through a loop of brocade. 'See, it's quite simple, really.' 

And it **was** simple, for a while. Alone in his midnight cabin, Blake lay back on the bed and shuffled through his memories, faster than one of Vila's card tricks. Avon in academic mode, inducting him into the art of sodomy. Blake slyly teaching Avon the art of accepting affection. Avon allowing Blake to drape an arm around him when they were on the flight deck. Blake watching the others stare and then avert their eyes, venture a few barbed comments, talk together in corners and finally come to terms with the situation. Blake rhapsodising endlessly about his new sense of liberation. Avon citing instances of Federation homophobia, to dampen his enthusiasm. Blake searching for the words that would show Avon how much he loved him. Avon listening and smiling indulgently. 

Avon asleep, one arm shielding his head. Avon waking, momentarily dazed and open, before his defences snapped into place - although, if Blake was able to reach him before that happened, he could fuck Avon until he was almost sure he heard the echo of unspoken words: 'I love you'. Avon's cock, filling his hand or his mouth or his arse. Avon's face, illuminated by orgasm. And Avon after sex, saying for the twentieth time, 'It can't last, of course.' Always holding something back. Blake had tried to get as much as he could, while he could, even though he'd known it would have to end at some point. 

And maybe now it had.

Then he snarled, seeing through his pretence of resignation. **Damn Avon. He makes me greedy. I thought I could settle for a few nights with him - but I've had six months and I still want more.** He considered the possibility of storming down the corridor, to make Avon explain himself, but he couldn't summon the energy. Consoling his parents, while they grieved for his brother and sister, had drained Blake dry. Ever since the mindwipe, his energy had been undependable, carrying him through crises and emergencies, then plunging him into intervals of lethargic brooding. 

**Avon steadies me ... but I can do without him, if necessary. And it looks as though it** will **be necessary.**

 

*

 

Perhaps the most irritating aspect of his current situation, Avon decided, was that Gwyneth Blake fitted into the daily routine of life on board Liberator far better than he ever could. She made cakes for Vila and mothered Jenna in a way that Avon would have found nauseating, if he hadn't witnessed Jenna's grief when Zen confronted her with a vision of her mother's death. Gan had a big man's protective instincts towards small women. Cally traded stories with Gwyneth and Huw, comparing the resistance movements on Cymry IV and Saurian Major. And Blake played the dutiful son, explaining the Liberator's workings in exhaustive detail, indulging in long sessions of family reminiscences and generally allowing his mother to monopolise his time. 

All in all, Avon had begun to feel distinctly superfluous, long before the day when he realised he'd left his favourite probe on the flight deck and went strolling down the corridor, just in time to overhear Gwyneth saying, 'Can you explain what my son sees in Kerr Avon?'

It was an almost irresistible cue. Avon hesitated, struggling with the temptation to materialise like the demon in a Delta revivalist show and say, 'Well now, he thinks I'm a good fuck, of course.' Luckily, at that point Vila launched into an extended fit of coughing. 

'Oh, the normal sort of thing,' he mumbled, once he'd recovered.

'Normal?' Gwyneth snapped. 'There's nothing normal about preferring that ... that person to a sweet, pretty girl like Jenna.' She sighed and added, 'I'm sorry, Olag. I realise Roj has missed his chance with Jenna now. But I don't understand what on earth could've driven him into something as - well, **sterile** as a relationship with another man.'

'I don't understand it either,' Gan said, amiable as always. 'Still, everyone's different, I suppose.'

'That's certainly true where Avon's concerned,' Gwyneth said crisply. 'One look would be enough to convince anybody that there's something queer about him. I can't help feeling he deliberately set out to recruit poor Roj - although, come to think of it, Roj was always interested in anything out of the ordinary. Hmm. Perhaps Cally ... I'm not sure whether aliens can mate with humans but ...' 

That was enough. Avon strode out, collected the probe and departed, saying, 'Don't let me interrupt you' with just the right degree of ambiguity to leave Gan shuffling guiltily, while even Vila seemed vaguely mortified. Back in the corridor, he allowed himself a brief smile of triumph, although it soon faded. In some ways, he couldn't help admiring Gwyneth's aptitude for simple certainties, having already learnt to admire that aptitude in her son. 

How long would it take before Blake, infected by his mother's certainties, rejected him completely? He had been withdrawing from Avon by slow degrees, letting his mother trap him into endless consultations with Jenna or Cally, avoiding Avon's eyes whenever Gwyneth delivered a particularly cutting gibe. Meanwhile, Avon had retreated into his work, just as he had always done when the rest of his life became unendurable, adding another layer to his defences, by now so solid that he could barely register Blake's presence. He was distantly aware that Blake seemed unhappy but then, supposing Blake had decided to put an end to their connection, he was sentimental enough to regret causing Avon pain. 

**And I refuse to ask for confirmation, because I do not wish to know.**

Ah, well, it had only ever been a matter of time before Blake recognised the inherent liabilities of queerdom and reasserted his claim to normality. Having faced the facts squarely, Avon smiled with bitter satisfaction and returned to his current refuge in one of the Liberator's back rooms. As he sat down at his work table, a leather armchair in the opposite corner lurched and creaked. 

'Sorry, Avon,' Huw Blake said, scrambling to his feet. 'I could tell this must be somebody's bolt hole but - well, I needed to get away. No offence to you or the rest of the crew, of course. It's just that, as far as I was concerned, one of the worst things about life in a Federation prison camp was the lack of privacy. Don't worry, though. I'll leave you to it now.' 

He looked so meek and large and conciliatory that Avon felt obliged to invite him to remain. Huw promised to be as silent as a mouse but ten minutes later Avon found he'd been lured into explaining Orac's operations, while Huw nodded and listened with a glazed intensity that suggested he didn't understand a word of it. 

'Orac is what first calendar researchers used to call an artificial intelligence,' Avon simplified politely. 'As a matter of fact, Ensor found his initial ideas in the private papers of a first calendar scientist called Alan Turing. Turing was both a genius and, unfortunately, an overt queer, at a time when homosexuality was actively penalised, rather than merely discouraged, as it is now. In consequence, he was never given the research opportunities he deserved and then, after admitting his queerness to a law enforcement officer in a moment of foolish honesty, he was prosecuted, subjected to doses of hormones and, a little later, killed himself.' 

He broke off, concerned that he might have inadvertently slipped into Blakean polemic. When he glanced up apologetically, Huw was scowling at him and furrowing his grey curls with both hands.

'That's an appalling story, Avon,' he said flatly. 'And, as you imply, it's probably still happening today. What a ridiculous waste of talent!'

'You think so?' Avon murmured. 'Somehow, I didn't expect you to see it that way.'

'Well, you couldn't really know what to expect from me,' Huw pointed out. 'After all, you've never asked for my opinions.' 

Since that was true, Avon made no attempt to deny it. He returned to his diagrams of Orac's circuitry, although a few minutes later he surprised himself by looking up and saying, somewhat obliquely, 'Blake reacts to homophobia. In my experience, that comes perilously close to validating it. I prefer to avoid confrontation, wherever possible.' 

'Roj doesn't know much about the dark side,' Huw said, equally lateral. 'Neither does Gwyneth. That's how she managed to steer us through two years in a Federation prison camp, relatively unscathed. I steer us through ... other things.' He gnawed his thumb for a while and then added, in an apparent change of subject, 'You realise Gwyneth will come around, once she understands?' 

'Understands what?' Avon asked, frowning. 

'That Roj has been looking for someone like you all his life,' Huw said promptly. 'He hasn't told you so himself?' 

'Well, you see, he doesn't recollect a great deal of his previous life,' Avon explained. 'However, I'm afraid I find that theory rather hard to believe.'

'I don't,' Huw said. 'But then, I **can** recollect a great deal of Roj's previous life. While he was at school and university, he used to bring a series of boys home for the holidays. Half of them were lame dogs and the other half were skilled debaters, although none of them ever lasted for long. I remember thinking he really needed someone who was combative **and** vulnerable ...' 

His voice trailed away and he blinked guiltily, clearly wondering whether he had gone too far. Avon, unaccountably amused, spread his hands in a dismissive gesture. Encouraged, Huw hitched himself to the edge of his seat and leaned forward conspiratorially. 

'You do like him, don't you?' he asked. 

Avon sighed. 'Oh, more than that, I'm afraid.' 

'Good,' Blake's father said economically. 'Now, tell me more about artificial intelligences.'

For some reason, this elliptical conversation had a lasting effect. After Avon had finished collating his printouts, he stared at the diagrams until his eyes blurred and then rose, hesitated briefly and went out to the flight deck, where Gwyneth, more technologically literate than her husband, was enlisting Cally to help Blake explain the operation of the force wall. Avon lounged against the wall and listened, while they tried to convince her that the force wall was Avon's area of expertise. As Gwyneth simmered with exasperation, he strolled across to the terminal and leaned past Blake, resting a hand on his shoulder, while he pointed out the relevant areas of the display. 

Blake reached back instantly and caught hold of his hand, looking up at him with such open relief and gratitude that Avon's heart clenched and expanded painfully. Annoyed by the strength of his reaction, he turned towards Gwyneth and launched into a brisk lecture on force wall technology. Blake's mother questioned him ruthlessly, extracting every scrap of information that he possessed, while her eyes flicked sideways, settled on their paired hands and veered away again. At the first hiatus in the conversation, Blake stood up, retaining his grip on Avon's hand, and headed for the stairs with a dogged determination that Avon found himself unable to resist. 

'So you haven't written me off completely?' he demanded, as his cabin door hissed shut behind them. 

'Now, why would I do that?' Avon asked. 

Blake shrugged. 'You always told me it wouldn't last,' he said with a reasonable approximation of stoicism. 'I kept thinking there'd be time to change your mind but over the past few weeks you seemed to have given up on me.' 

'I was merely anticipating your wishes,' Avon explained. 'I assumed you had finally recognised the disadvantages of a male lover.' 

'You thought I was ashamed of you?' Blake said incredulously. 'Christ, Avon, where did you get that idea?' 

Avon smiled pleasantly. 'From two decades of experience,' he said. 

Blake thumped down onto the bed and chewed his thumb knuckle for a while. 'Yes, our experiences have been very different, haven't they?' he said finally. 'Especially our experiences of being queer. You've always told me that but now I'm starting to see what you mean.'

'And what aspect of your past experience prompted you to ignore me?' Avon asked, determinedly casual.

'I haven't been ignoring you,' Blake said hotly. 'Not intentionally, at any rate. But - well, you know what my mother's like, so it shouldn't be hard to guess that she's always looked forward to playing matriarch to a brood of grandchildren. In the space of a few sentences, I took all of that away from her. I wanted to give her time to adjust, before I started haranguing her about gay rights.' He broke off to nail Avon with an accusing stare, adding, 'I told you that, weeks ago.' 

Avon stared back, scanning his memory. 'I suppose you did,' he conceded. 'However, I can't say it made much sense to me, either then or now.' 

'You don't understand the concept of making allowances for people you love? What kind of family do you come from?' 

'I believe the technical term is dysfunctional,' Avon told him. 

'Yes, I'd gathered that,' Blake said wryly. 'I was hoping for something more specific.' 

'Were you, now?' Avon murmured. 'Would this be specific enough?' 

He wedged his knee against Blake's thigh and swung the other knee up in counterbalance, positioning himself on Blake's lap and leaning in for a kiss. Blake shifted awkwardly, trying to avert his head. His eyes were shadowed and anxious, all his usual sublime confidence held in abeyance.

**As if the fool really believed I might abandon him - although, on reflection, perhaps Blake wasn't altogether foolish. After all, I almost convinced myself that he had rejected me.**

He tilted Blake's face towards him and looked into multifaceted hazel eyes, smiling at human folly. Avon watched till Blake's mouth twitched into an answering smile and then swooped down to kiss him, hiding his sense of reprieve from Blake: and from himself.

 

*

 

To Blake's relief, Avon stayed around from then on, although he said less than usual, conspicuously absenting himself from the discussions about Gwyneth and Huw's departure. Blake's parents finally opted to join Avalon's advance guard in the Cymry system, hoping for a chance to assist in the liberation of their home planet. They teleported down to the main base on Cymry II, a ramshackle conglomeration of tents and dormitories, mired in ankle-deep mud. Avalon came striding over to welcome Blake and his crew, then turned her attention to her new recruits, identifying their skills and assigning their duties in the space of a few energetic minutes. After that, Huw drifted off to inspect the kitchens - 'the best way to get a feel for the place,' he explained - while Gwyneth took her son on a tour of the base. 

'Avalon's a nice girl,' she commented, pausing to assess the weapons cache like a veteran. 'She seems to really like you, Roj.' 

'Yes, and the names are so similar,' Avon said helpfully from behind them. 'Avon. Avalon. It would really be quite easy to replace one with the other.' 

Gwyneth turned and looked up at him. 'Oh dear, you're more perceptive than I thought,' she said with a sigh. 'I've made a mistake, haven't I? Huw was right - you're exactly what Roj needs. He's always been a little too impetuous but you'll curb that. I think it's time we had a chat, Kerr.' 

She tucked a small hand into the crook of Avon's arm and led him away to quiet corner. Blake watched from a distance, amused to see that even his recalcitrant lover was unable to resist Gwyneth, when she set out to charm him. They talked together, subdued and intent, until Huw wandered back and informed his wife that their mess mates were waiting to meet her. While he planted a pair of paternal kisses on Blake's cheeks, Gwyneth stood on tiptoe and hugged Avon warmly, which disconcerted him as much as it entertained Blake. He wrapped his arms round his mother, hoisting her off the ground and swinging her in an exuberant circle. 

'Thank you,' he whispered, as he set her down.

'What for?' Gwyneth said briskly. 'I should've got to know your Avon sooner. Never mind, there'll be time for that when you come to visit.'

Blake laughed and said his farewells and called for teleport. Back on the Liberator, Avon followed him to his cabin, lounging against the wall and watching Blake tug off his muddy boots.

'Your mother seemed quite effusive at the end there,' he said, visibly puzzled. 

'Oh, I always knew she'd come around,' Blake said over his shoulder, as he hunted for a pair of dry socks. 

'Where did you get that idea?' Avon asked. 'I wouldn't be generally regarded as a good candidate for parental approval.' 

Blake squatted down to forage through a mound of clothes. 'My mother only wants what's best for me,' he explained. 'It was just a matter of convincing her that you fitted the bill.' He sat back on his heels, saying irritably, 'I'm glad my parents are alive and I look forward to spending time with them in future but I must say it's a relief to get them off my ship. It isn't easy to maintain proper discipline, with one's parents perpetually hovering in the background.' 

Avon's eyes widened. 'What a magnificently simple view of the world you have, Roj,' he said, half mocking and half admiring. 

Blake pounced on the missing socks and looked up in triumph. 'Yes, that's why we make a good team, because we complement each other,' he remarked. Then he frowned, faintly worried, and added, 'You do know we're a good team, don't you, Kerr?' 

He watched Avon hesitate and reflect, clearly still somewhat overwhelmed by the Blake family. 'As a matter of fact, I do,' he said eventually, avoiding Blake's eyes.

Blake dropped the socks and surged to his feet, hauling Avon into an impetuous embrace. Avon resisted and then yielded, so suddenly that they toppled together onto the bed. Clothes flew through the air and piled in a heap on the floor, beside the socks. As Blake stripped off his shirt, Avon twisted round to nip his bare shoulder. Blake yelped indignantly and wrestled him to the mattress, discovering that Avon had somehow contrived to reverse himself and land face down, arse lifted suggestively. 

'Tart,' he growled. 'All right, then. Whatever you want.' 

He collected a tube of gel from the bedside locker and began to prepare Avon. A familiar ritual, by this time: within minutes, he was angled over Avon's body, balanced securely on his clenched fists, cock sheathed in warm pliable flesh. Blake eased forward and back, lowering himself slightly with each movement until his elbows took the weight and his hands could lift and stroke Avon's sides, as slowly and thoroughly as his cock was stroking Avon's arse. When he bent to lay a trail of gentle kisses from shoulder to shoulder, Avon wriggled and bucked impatiently. 

'Harder,' he said in a stranger's voice.

Blake's throat tightened. He lunged involuntarily, then restrained himself with an effort. 'That mightn't be such a good idea,' he murmured. 'I don't want to risk hurting you, love.' 

'You won't,' Avon said harshly. 'Harder, Blake.'

He clenched his buttocks, gripping tighter than a cock ring. Blake's shaft stiffened and strained. **Harder? Hell, I feel hard as iron.** He reared back, wrenching a groan from the bottom of his lungs as the sphincter squeezed his cock like an implacable fist. Avon fought him and welcomed him, one minute tensing his arse to make Blake work for every centimetre, next minute swinging his knee sideways, opening wide and inciting him to plunge deeper. Blake rammed and grunted and heaved, each successive thrust pushing him closer to the edge of unknown and dangerous territory. Avon was writhing beneath him now, sobbing for breath and crying out, wilder and more abandoned than Blake had ever heard him. His vulnerability was addictive. Blake couldn't get enough. 

Then, while he struggled with the temptation to pound down Avon's remaining defences and fuck him into submission, Blake's balls jerked sharply, flooding his groin with liquid fire. Orgasm offered a resolution to his conflicting impulses. He sank and stilled and came in slow steady spurts, releasing all his month-long anger at Avon's evasions: and all the love underlying his anger. Avon whimpered and ground his pelvis against the mattress, too urgent to wait for Blake's hand - although, the instant Blake pulled away, he rolled onto his back and stared up, as defiantly unreadable as ever. **Elated or afraid?** Blake opened his mouth to ask, then changed his mind and decided to let Avon maintain his privacy. 

'So what did you and my mother talk about?' he asked instead. 

Avon yawned and stretched. 'This and that,' he said, intentionally vague. 'It's rather disconcerting to find myself cast in the role of daughter-in-law. I warn you, Roj, I draw the line at cooking your favourite dinners.' 

'Oh, I don't think my mother would expect that,' Blake said with a grin. 'Her revolutionary agenda mightn't have included gay rights, until this morning, but she's always been very strong on feminism.' 

'Well now, that's a relief,' Avon drawled. 'Gwyneth does have a notable ability to get precisely what she wants. Meeting her has been quite an education. I understand you much better now.' He paused, glanced sidelong at Blake and added, 'Perhaps I should reciprocate. By an odd coincidence, I discovered that my parents are currently occupying their country cottage on Lindor, two planets away, which prompted me to consider the idea of paying them a visit. Would you be interested in accompanying me, Roj?' 

Blake's breath caught in his throat. He blinked fast and bowed his head, awed by this sign of trust. His first impulse was to say, 'I'd love it' but he didn't want to discourage Avon by sounding too effusive. So he shrugged and borrowed a line from Avon's repertoire.

'All right,' he said lightly. 'Why not?'

2\. Avon smiled guilelessly at the viewscreen on the flight deck. A familiar face dimpled back, eyebrows arched extravagantly over thick-lashed doe's eyes, sleek dark hair drawn into a knot of braids, pointed chin resting negligently against a smooth white hand. His mother had obviously paid another visit to the rejuvenation clinic: at this rate, she would look younger than he did on their next encounter.

'I'll have to consult your father before confirming those details,' she purred. 'But I'm sure we can come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement, after a few minor adjustments. I do hope you'll be reasonable, Kerr. I'm dying to find out what you've been up to.'

Her image contracted to a pinpoint of light, then winked out. Avon swung away to consult the chart on his console, crossing off another pair of worst case scenarios and one of the best case scenarios. He frowned moodily at the results. If the bargaining continued in this fashion, he seemed likely to get the terms he was aiming for, which was rather disconcerting. Either he'd overlooked some crucial flaw in his planning or else his parents were genuinely eager to see him, a prospect that Avon found as daunting as it was improbable.

He was still frowning at the chart when Vila tiptoed down the steps, making an elaborate comic performance out of being small and unobtrusive. Avon's frown deepened into a scowl.

'What the hell are you doing here?' he demanded. 'I told you to stay out of my way.'

'That was three hours ago,' Vila complained. 'If I'd known you were going to take over the flight deck for the entire shift, I would've rescued my special pack of cards. Come on, Avon, do me a favour, just this once. Let me have a look around, to see if I can remember where I put them.'

'Oh, all right,' Avon sighed. 'But be quick about it.'

Vila beamed triumphantly and snapped his fingers. Straight away Jenna and Gan and Cally came surging down the steps, with an alacrity that suggested they'd been waiting in the corridor. Jenna strode over to the pilot's console and began to run a check on the navigation computer. Gan collected a bag of jubes from the side table and then went to help Vila hunt for his cards, overturning cushions and rummaging through the seating bay, while Cally drifted across to Avon's side and studied him sympathetically.

'Your blood pressure has risen by two points and there is a migraine aura forming across the left hemisphere of your brain,' she observed. 'Blake's parents never elicited that kind of reaction from him. Are you sure this is a good idea, Avon?'

'No, I am not,' he replied. 'However, I don't intend to stop now. If you want to help, you can assist me by leaving - and taking those other fools with you.'

As Cally smiled tolerantly and patted his arm, Zen's screen pinged. Avon shook her hand off and leapt to his feet, shouting, 'Get out, all of you! Now.' The frisson of panic in his voice embarrassed him and unnerved the others. They scattered and bolted for the steps, disappearing into the corridor just as his mother's image formed on the screen. Avon drew in a long breath and smoothed his hair with both hands, settled back at his console and prepared to resume negotiations.

Two hours later the image faded for the last time. When Avon looked up, the flight deck seemed to be shrouded in pale mist. He blinked, rubbed his eyes and jotted down a comprehensive summary of the final terms in his elegantly illegible handwriting. As he hoisted himself out of the chair, discs clicked at the base of his spine and his muscles twanged protestingly. Avon stretched and touched his toes, then took the stairs two at a time, pausing at the door of the recreation room to say, 'The flight deck is free now,' by way of apology for his momentary panic. Blake caught up with him at the door of his cabin.

'Well?' he asked. 'How did it go?'

Avon palmed the lock, dragged his boots off and collapsed on the bed. 'We arrive at my parents' house at 1930 hours tomorrow,' he said, letting his eyes close. 'They have agreed to send all but one of their servants to a nearby encampment, after which I will seal the house with a force sphere for the duration of our visit. Tench, my parents' butler, is seventy years old and blind, so we shan't be in any danger from him - although, naturally, I intend to run a heat sensor check before we depart, to make sure there are no more than three people in the house. In return, I have given my word that neither you nor I will bring any kind of armaments with us and that we will allow ourselves to be searched on entering and leaving - a reasonable concession, I think, given that my father has also promised not to use any of his weapons.'

He rubbed his temples and waited to be congratulated. After the silence had stretched out for half a minute, Avon levered his eyes open again. Blake was standing at the end of the bed, mouth gaping, as though he'd been hit by a blast from a stungun.

'That sounds very ... comprehensive,' he said. 'Although, considering all your other precautions, I'm surprised you're prepared to rely on simple promises, when it comes to the weaponry.'

Blake was clearly making one of his awkward attempts at humour but Avon felt annoyed, all the same. 'Those "simple promises" were the most difficult part of the negotiation,' he said sharply. 'Among the Alpha Elite, a man's word is considered binding. It is one of the cornerstones of Elite culture.'

'Oh, is it?' Blake said, still irritatingly amused. 'In that case, why didn't you just make your parents promise to leave us alone, while we're in their house?'

'Too open-ended,' Avon sighed. 'The Elite do exactly as they promise, nothing less but nothing more. According to your formulation, my parents would be entitled to call in the Federation to arrest us, once they realised they were playing host to the galaxy's most notorious outlaw - after all, technically speaking, they could themselves still claim to be leaving us alone. However, I feel confident that my formulation covers all the possible contingencies.' 

Blake stared at him for a long moment. 'Avon, we're visiting your parents, not planning a raid on Servalan's headquarters,' he pointed out. 

'I know,' Avon told him. 'That's why I am being more cautious than usual. This is not a pleasure trip, Blake. If you have visions of sharing sentimental reminiscences with my parents, think again. In my family, I am regarded as tolerant to the point of weakness and excessively liberal in my social and political opinions - and before you ask: no, I haven't changed greatly since I left home.'

That finally seemed to get through to Blake. He sat down heavily on the bed, examining Avon with scientific curiosity. 'Bran Foster used to tell me the Elite were different from the rest of us,' he commented. 'I was convinced that all life is linked, so I didn't believe him. But maybe Bran had a point.'

'Oh, the Elite are much the same as everyone else,' Avon said wearily. 'Vain, greedy, jealous, self-centred, cruel and ruthless. Their wealth and status give them more latitude to express their little idiosyncrasies, that is all.'

The light of the cabin drilled through his irises, probing the dense ache at the base of his skull. His migraine was intensifying. Avon rolled sideways, flinging an arm up to shield his eyes, and felt the mattress dip as Blake moved closer.

'Vila caught a quick glimpse of your mother on the screen, after you ordered him off the flight deck,' he said, leaning over to massage Avon's neck. 'He claims she looks remarkably like Servalan.' 

Avon winced under the soothing hands. 'Oh dear, there is a lot I don't tell you, isn't there?' he said with a faint undertone of apology. 'Although neither of us has chosen to advertise the fact, Servalan is a second cousin on my mother's side. Mother was rather annoyed at the way in which cousin Irene positioned herself as the Servalan.' 

'Servalan's your cousin?' Blake said, laughing and disconcerted. 'That explains a thing or two. I sometimes used to wonder whether you fancied her'. 

'Yes, we've always flirted, ever since we were in our teens,' Avon murmured. 'Servalan's such a faghag that we both find it irresistible.'

As he smiled at the memories, Blake's hands slowed and stopped. 'Wait a minute,' he said in his rebel leader voice. 'If Servalan's related to your mother, won't your parents already realise you're involved with - ah, the galaxy's most notorious outlaw?'

'I'm not sure,' Avon admitted. 'At present, they don't appear to be aware of the connection. That could be a double bluff, of course, but equally, cousin Servalan may have elected to withhold the information. Knowledge is power, after all - and like power, it decreases in value when it is shared.'

Blake shifted uneasily, jarring the mattress. 'Well, at least the force sphere ought to prevent your parents from calling the troopers in,' he said wryly. 'I'm starting to understand some of your precautions. Is there anything else you haven't told me, Avon?'

'My name,' he remembered. 'I was, as it happens, christened Ivor Gilles Kirconnell Chesku. The Elite tend to recycle family names - my father's name is Ivor and I have an Uncle Gilles, so I was generally called Kerr within the family circle. Avon is my own invention.'

He was contemplating the regrettable circumstances under which he had acquired his new name, when a hand seized his shoulder, clamped tight and slammed him onto his back. 'Chesku, as in the recently retired Federation Minister for Justice?' Blake snarled.

'Unfortunately, yes,' Avon sighed. He looked up into stormcloud eyes and said, 'I am sorry, Roj. I should have volunteered that information sooner. If we continue with our plans, you are likely to learn rather more about me than you wish to know. Would you prefer to renege on the agreement?'

'Do I have a choice?' Blake asked, still stormy.

'Not as much as I might have given you,' Avon confessed.

Blake's eyes darkened further, then creased into a sudden smile. 'As long as we both agree that you're a manipulative little bastard, then ... yes, I still want to come with you. I can't say I like the idea of being civil to the man who presided over the ruin of the Freedom Party but - oh well, he'll probably dislike it as much as I do. Besides, I'm far too curious to back out now.'

The lights of the cabin were flashing like a distress signal: or so it seemed from behind Avon's eyes. He sighed again, relieved by the detente, and pulled Blake down beside him, determined to fuck him one more time, before tomorrow's risky venture. But as he turned his head, the spike of pain impaling his skull twisted and drove deeper. Avon realised with distanced regret that he barely had the strength to reach up and take hold of Blake's hand. Blake drew reassuring circles on his palm, then cuddled him close and talked comforting nonsense while Avon drifted into a troubled sleep, flinching at the images that peopled his dreams.

 

*

 

The dining room of the Cheskus' country cottage was twice the length of the Liberator's flight deck, shadowed by cobwebs of drapery fluttering from the ceiling, lambent with oblique reflections from the mirror-topped table and the glow-tailed worms weaving through the Lindorian livesilk tapestries on the walls. The patterns of light and shade were so confusing that it took Blake several minutes to be sure that Avon's father wasn't present. He'd already met Avon's mother in an anteroom, after Avon had activated the force sphere and the blind butler had patted them down and admitted them, all of which had clearly taken more time than Sarinda Chesku anticipated. She'd brushed cheeks with Avon and whisked them straight back across the hall.

'Hold the introductions, Kerr,' she said in transition. 'You appear to have forgotten that your father always sits down to dinner at 1940 hours.'

Now they were hovering beside the table, while an opalescent time flash marked the final countdown in nanoseconds. Avon and his mother managed to convey the impression that they were absorbed in examining the tapestries but Blake was blatantly shuffling his feet and watching the door. That turned out to be a tactical error. As the time flash blazed and dimmed, one of the tapestries billowed stormily. When it subsided, a man was standing at the head of the table, so vibrant with suppressed energy that the rest of the room became a vortex, orbiting around him. Blake glanced sideways and discovered that Avon and Sarinda had slid into their seats, presumably following some Elite protocol that had escaped him. He sighed.

**Avon might have given me a few clues, before we set out. But I suppose he takes all of this for granted.**

Avon's father turned and ran his eyes across Blake, with an impersonal force that left him feeling as if he'd been stripped naked. 'So you're still a pervert, Kerr,' he commented. 'That's the Servalan bloodline. Cheskus have more sense.'

He dumped a reader unit on the table and sat down, dismissing Blake from his notice, although seconds later his head jerked up and his eyes flared in hostile recognition. Avon smiled like a chess player who'd scored a point during a hard-fought game. He strolled back to Blake's side and leaned against him, more demonstrative than he'd ever been on Liberator.

'Mother and Father, I'd like to present Roj Blake,' he drawled. 'Roj darling, my parents, Ivor and Sarinda Chesku.'

Ivor Chesku flicked a switch on the reader unit, scowling at its screen with offensive concentration, but Sarinda let a tinkling laugh escape her perfect mouth.

'Roj Blake the rebel?' she lilted. 'How clever of you, Kerr! So you've found something even more unacceptable than rough trade or seducing your brother's fiancŽe.'

As Blake swung round, startled by the last item of information, Avon tucked a hand into the crook of his arm and steered him to a chair beside Sarinda, before returning to his seat. Marooned in Chesku formality, Blake found his gaze drawn irresistibly to Avon's father, hunched over the reader unit like a bird of prey. Feral yellow eyes squinted down a jutting nose, absorbing the lines of print at breakneck speed. When the butler dealt out a round of entrees, Ivor slammed a big hand onto his plate, groped unseeing through the array of molluscs and stuffed three Gondwana prawns into his mouth. Blake stared.

**Typical Elite table manners or another test? Better make sure, before I copy him.** 

He looked down and groaned inaudibly at the array of cutlery - knives, forks, spoons, picks, tongs and other implements he couldn't even name, stretching out on either side of his plate like bars on a cage. His reflection stared up at him from the mirror surface, peering between the bars with a worried frown. As Blake tried to smooth the lines from his forehead, Avon sighed and swept half his implements onto the floor.

'Really, Mother!' he said over the clatter. 'There was no need to tell Tench to set the table for a formal banquet.'

Sarinda's scarlet mouth puckered into a pout. 'I hope you're not becoming tiresome, Kerr,' she said petulantly. 'You never used to object when we teased provincial governors with an excess of etiquette.'

'Perhaps my sense of humour has changed since then,' Avon suggested.

'Impossible,' his mother said. 'Cheskus don't change.'

Her words echoed round the walls with the authority of an edict. Blake clung to the edge of the table, feeling hollow and weightless, so insubstantial that Sarinda's next breath might send him eddying across the room and out the door.

**Cheskus don't change - and Avon's a Chesku. I've made a hundred speeches about the corrupting effects of Elite privilege but I never expected it to become a personal problem.**

As he stared into the mirror, struggling against an attack of vertigo, Blake heard a chime like a silver bell. When he looked up, Avon was meditatively tapping a knife and fork on the table top. They held the gaze for a moment and then Blake bent to select the cutlery that Avon had indicated, still destabilised but consoled by the knowledge that Avon was, at least to some extent, on his side.

While he prodded his molluscs, Avon and Sarinda embarked on a stylised discussion, riddled with references to people Blake didn't know, mined with allusions that Blake didn't understand. They sniped and jousted, carping at each other's choice of words, then uniting to criticise some outsider with creative virulence. It was, Blake decided, the next event in the Chesku games, although he couldn't quite fathom the method by which Avon and his mother kept score. Ivor was easier to interpret, cutting across the conversation every now and then with a dismissive judgment which usually closed that particular topic.

'Sev Rontane?' he said at one point, when Sarinda and Avon were demolishing the reputation of an up-and-coming official. 'He turned out to be a faggot, just like you, Kerr - although I suppose all you perverts recognise each other on sight. Ever let him fuck you up the arse?'

Avon hooded his eyes. 'Rontane isn't my type,' he said, ostentatiously bored by the effort of explaining. 'Queers do have personal preferences, just like heterosexuals.'

Ivor stared and shrugged and lifted a strip of meat from the plate Tench had bestowed on him. 'Do they?' he asked, as he poked a trailing end into his mouth. 'I wouldn't know.'

Tench shuffled on, muttering irritably, and shoved a plate under Blake's nose. He frowned down at a pile of barely-cooked flesh, quivering in a pool of blood. Real meat, not the reconstituted protein to which the Liberator's food synthesiser had accustomed him. Blake's stomach churned. He scanned the table, sighed with relief and turned to Sarinda.

'If I asked for the sauce, would you make me justify my need for it or would you pass it to me?' he said.

Sarinda blinked, as disconcerted as if the sauce boat had spoken, then released another tinkling laugh. 'Kerr, your barbarian is wittier than he looks!' she exclaimed. 'I must say he's almost presentable, for a provincial.'

She scanned Blake thoughtfully, subjecting him to a visual autopsy that clearly placed him in the Cymry system and quite possibly traced right him back to Cymry IV. To break her focus, he glanced at the sauce boat and held out his hand. Sarinda laughed again, amused by his presumption. 

'Sauce, Tench,' she said indulgently.

The butler shambled round the table, muttering something about 'nice goings on in a decent house' and 'bloody fags sitting down to dinner,' as he groped for the sauce boat and shunted it towards Blake. He doused his meat with peppery sauce, which enabled him to swallow most of it, while Avon and Sarinda languidly demolished a few more Elite reputations. When Tench started another circuit of the table, banging plates onto a trolley, Avon's father wiped bloody hands down his shirt and hoisted himself to his feet.

'Come to my study, Ivor,' he commanded.

Apparently, his father's use of Avon's first name wasn't standard practice in the Chesku household. Avon's chin lifted and his eyes widened fractionally before he answered, without any inflection, 'Why should I?'

'Because, until I get your signature on a couple of documents, you still have some residual legal connection to this family,' his father growled.

'All right,' Avon said, pushing his chair back. 'That sounds like a worthy cause.'

As he rose, Ivor loomed over him, jamming an arm across his throat and spinning him around. 'Take a good look at your bit of rough, before you make any final decisions,' he snarled. 'He'll be dead within a year, you know.'

'Perhaps,' Avon rasped. 'Although no doubt people said the same about you, while you were clawing your way to the top of the Elite hierarchy.'

'True,' Ivor agreed, clearly taking it as a compliment. 'But Roj Blake, Mindwipe 187, isn't going to top any hierarchies, no matter how well he tops you. I've seen enough of him now to know he doesn't have the ambition.'

'How kind of you to point it out, Father,' Avon murmured. 'Yet another reason to prefer him.'

Ivor's forearm twitched and tightened, yanking Avon's head back against his shoulder. He scowled down for several long seconds, angry yellow eyes only centimetres away from opaque amber eyes. 

'It's hard to believe you're my son,' he observed, casually contemptuous. 'Come.'

He released his grip, so abruptly that Avon staggered and almost fell. As he clutched the table and gasped for breath, Blake stared intently, willing him to refuse his father's summons. But Avon's temporary vulnerability had evidently lost him a point in the Cheskus' complex game, because he straightened his spine and followed his father to the door, mutely obedient. Blake watched them leave, charged with such free-floating anxiety that he jumped when Sarinda laid a delicate hand on his arm.

'Ivor never takes dessert,' she said, as though that explained the scene they'd just witnessed. 'However, I feel sure you have a sweet tooth, Roj. Would you like to join me in the drawing room for a pot of chocolate?'

Compared to the stark magnificence of the Cheskus' dining room, the drawing room was claustrophobically intimate. Red velvet walls, embossed with intricate goldleaf landscapes, enclosed a maze of purple velvet chairs and couches, the pathways between them clogged by a dozen small gilt tables. Sarinda threaded through the maze and arranged herself on the most spectacularly ornate couch, gesturing imperiously at the table in front of them. Blake looked down at two white porcelain eggs, inset with silver cups, each accompanied by a long-handled silver spoon, a jug of white liquid and a dish of brown flakes.

**Oh, wonderful. Another test. Can't the Cheskus ever let up for a moment?**

Fortunately, Blake's brain elected to regard the eggs as an engineering problem, rather than a social problem. He spotted a flamestick on the table, located a hole in the side of the nearest egg and lit the small candles positioned under their silver cups. A few minutes later he and Sarinda were sitting in companionable silence, spoons clinking musically, while the candle flames melted chocolate into the white liquid. It was an unexpectedly calming ritual. When Sarinda demonstrated how to use the spoon's hollow handle as a straw, flirtatiously compressing her red mouth into a cupid's bow, Blake smiled back with genuine amusement, before leaning forward to sip from his own pot.

'You're fond of Kerr, aren't you?' she fluted, just as the hot sweet liquid filled his mouth.

Blake choked and swallowed. 'I love him, if that's what you mean,' he said.

'Love?' Sarinda echoed speculatively. 'Not a word that's often used in the Chesku household. Let me be more specific, Roj. You seem, heaven knows why, to be besotted with my son at present. How long do you think this little dalliance will last?' 

Blake's first impulse was to say, 'It's none of your business.' Then, as he opened his mouth, a more obscure instinct took over, prompting him to reveal a piece of information that he hadn't confided to anyone on board Liberator. 

'I've asked Avon to pairbond,' he said gruffly. 'But he keeps coming up with reasons against it.' 

'A different reason each time?' Sarinda said, quick and conspiratorial. 'Keep asking, Roj dear. He'll agree in the end. Kerr needs someone like you and I think - or, at any rate, I hope he has the sense to realise it.' She held his gaze for half a second and then let her eyes drift away to the door, adding lightly, 'You are, after all, more attractive than his usual rough trade.' 

As she ran a fingernail down the triangle of bare skin at the neck of Blake's shirt, Avon came strolling towards them. Blake glanced up, annoyed to find himself blushing hotly. 

'No need to look so alarmed, Roj,' Avon said, unperturbed. 'Flirting is as natural as breathing to the Servalan clan. They practise it from the cradle onwards.' 

'You make it sound quite impersonal,' Sarinda complained. 'As it happens, your barbarian positively inspires flirtation. Those curls - delightfully original! No Elite could tolerate the disorder, of course, but I suppose it reminds provincials of those woolly animals - sneep or shoop: something like that.'

Avon murmured, 'TouchŽ' and they examined each other thoughtfully, preparing for the next round of barbed comments. Blake decided he'd had enough. He rose to his feet, interposing himself between mother and son. 

'Don't worry,' he told Sarinda. 'I'll look after him for you.'

In response, she shuttered her eyes and sighed, theatrically pained by Blake's directness. 'I see,' Avon said, smiling down at her. 'So you have been transferring your maternal responsibilities yet again?'

His mother inclined her head. 'Aren't you grateful, Kerr?'

'Of course,' Avon said and they laughed together, hands lifted at the same wary angle, like a pair of exotic birds ready to take flight at the first sign of danger. It made a charming picture, no less charming for being deliberately composed, although for the first time Blake thought he could detect signs of rapport under the artifice. He joined in the laughter, adding a bass counterpoint to their lighter tones, and they turned towards him, eyes meeting in a moment of shared understanding, instantly broken when a shadow blocked the door.

'Tell your son that this house is equipped with the latest security systems,' Ivor Chesku growled to Sarinda.

'Tell your husband that I can dismantle any security system,' Avon replied.

His father snorted. 'Another of your terrorist tricks, I suppose. All right, Kerr, don't wreck the circuitry. I give you my word that I'll turn it off for the night.'

Blake frowned, assessing the nuances. Avon seemed to have been demoted from 'Ivor' back to 'Kerr', presumably as a result of the conversation in the study. It didn't appear to bother him, however. He turned in a stagy half-circle, smiling slightly to the left of the door.

'I'm much obliged, Father,' he said courteously. 'That should save me at least five minutes work.'

Ivor grunted and left but the fragile understanding had been demolished. Sarinda stifled an affected yawn and summoned the butler to show Avon and Blake to their room. Tench shuffled up the stairs ahead of them, joints audibly creaking.

'I've put you in the Blue Room,' he wheezed. 'Will that suit you, Master Kerr?'

'No,' Avon said curtly. 'I prefer my old room.'

Tench tottered to the first room down the left hand corridor, kicked the door open and ambled off, muttering, 'Bloody little nuisance. Never satisfied. Have to fetch the fucking towels now.' Blake wanted to pull Avon into his arms, to reassure himself that Avon could still be attracted to a barbarian, but he didn't fancy the idea of being interrupted by Tench, so he clasped his hands behind his back and surveyed the room. A black lacquer desk with one of the early tarriel cell computers, a black-sheeted bed and glossy black walls, studded with lifesized holos of the superheroes from Blake's teenage vid-viewing, dressed in iridescent skinsuits that left little to the imagination. When he grinned at the superheroes, Avon's shoulders lifted in an exaggerated shrug.

'I was fourteen years old when I left this house for a boarding school in the Federation capital,' he said, faintly defensive. 'I have rarely been back since then, so my room remains unchanged.'

'You grew up here?' Blake asked, surprised. 'I thought you called it your parents' country cottage.'

'It was,' Avon said. 'My parents only visited during my father's infrequent vacations. As the second - and therefore dispensable - son, I was raised by Tench and a computer.'

'Tench brought you up?' he said, even more surprised. 'Strange, you didn't seem particularly pleased to see each other.'

'As I said, Tench raised me,' Avon repeated patiently. 'Or, rather, he supervised my progress through the Elite child-rearing program. Since I had, even then, an inconvenient habit of questioning everything I was told, we developed a mutual and enduring dislike.'

At that point, Tench dawdled in and dumped a pile of towels on the bed, demonstrating the durability of his dislike by mumbling, 'Bloody perverts - and it's me who'll have to deal with the fucking sheets.' When the door slammed behind him, Blake turned eagerly, arms already opening, only to find himself confronted by Avon's back. His hands dropped to his sides and he stood stranded in the middle of the room, watching Avon investigate the long mirror opposite the bed with an absorbed concentration that excluded him completely. Eventually, Blake decided he had nothing to lose by asking the question that had been puzzling him all evening.

'Avon, what did your mother mean by that reference to your seduction of your brother's fiancŽe?'

'Precisely what she said,' Avon replied abstractedly.

He tapped his way down the frame of the mirror, identified some variation in the sound and tapped again. Blake shifted from one foot to the other, feeling large and awkward and intimidated.

'I thought you'd always been exclusively homosexual,' he ventured.

Avon sighed. 'Yes, well, I've warned you about the dangers of making assumptions. I admit I started flirting with Anna Grant from a natural desire to annoy my brother - and, indeed, my father, who wasn't impressed by Mikel's taste in fiancŽes. However, I soon realised that Anna and I had a lot in common - a shared sense of humour and a similarly perverse sexuality: I always suspected that Anna's interest in cousin Servalan went further than an old boarding school rivalry. Somehow, we convinced each other that our only hope of salvation lay in escaping together. Hence the banking fraud, which resulted in Anna's death, my incarceration and the end of my capacity for hope.' He turned abruptly, presenting a face like a white mask. 'Is that what you wanted to know, Blake? And does it matter?'

'Not to me,' Blake said sturdily. 'Does it matter to you?'

In answer, Avon took a long step forward, thrust a hand under his jaw and kissed him - a cursory, tight-mouthed kiss with nothing erotic about it, obviously designed to shut him up. Blake closed his eyes and endured until Avon released him and returned to the mirror, after which he swung away and started to strip off his clothes, hands shaking with fatigue and misery. As he stumbled across to the bed, Avon said, 'Got it!' and prised a tiny black chip from the frame.

'What's going on?' Blake asked, startled when his voice sounded almost normal.

'A quadruple bluff, if I am counting right,' Avon informed him. 'My father promises to switch off the circuitry of the security system - but neglects to mention the individual bugs concealed in every room. I accept his offer - and proceed to neutralise the bug. A fairly typical interaction: quadruple bluffs are standard practice in the Chesku family. We have been known to go as far as octuple bluffs on occasion.'

'Yes, I can believe it,' Blake said flatly.

He crawled into bed and huddled under the black sheets, shivering at their chilly touch. His heart felt like a fist-shaped mass of ice wedged painfully in his chest, frozen solid by four hours' exposure to the Chesku family. Sarinda's deft insults, Ivor's violent contempt, discovering that Avon had neglected to mention a lover whom he had considered his salvation - it all combined to make Blake feel more irrelevant than he could have previously imagined. 

'Are you coming to bed?' he asked, morbidly testing the one area where he still hoped he might mean something to Avon. 

No answer. Instead, Avon leaned closer to the mirror, levering at the frame with his thumbnail. It was the last straw. A surge of indignation scorched along Blake's arteries, firing his temper and melting the ice around his heart.

'What's the problem, Avon?' he growled. 'Too provincial for you, am I?'

Avon's head snapped up, displaying his mirrored eyes, wide-open and dark and stricken. Apparently, Blake was right: and Avon was mortified. There were no apologies, of course - **that'd be too much to ask** - but he shifted to meet Blake's gaze, dazzling the mirror with a reflected smile.

'Hardly,' he drawled. 'As it happens, that is one of your principal charms.'

'So I do have **some** charms, despite being a barbarian?' Blake demanded.

'Oh, you're full of them,' Avon said, desperately sincere.

Blake relaxed back on the pillows. 'Tell me the top three,' he suggested with a last flicker of insecurity.

Avon whirled away from the mirror and flung himself onto the bed, leaning down to touch Blake's hair and cheek and mouth. 'I am glad that your hair curls,' he said. 'I am glad that your face always shows what you are thinking. I am glad that you say what you mean, rather than communicating through oblique innuendo.' 

'Glad I'm an antidote for the Chesku poison?' Blake said smugly, although a second later his doubts kicked in again, causing him to add, 'If it does help, having me here.' 

'More than you could possibly guess,' Avon told him. 'I was about to slip into playing my family's vicious little games - but as usual you grab me by the scruff of the neck and haul me back to reality. Would you like to complete the process by fucking me senseless?' 

'Here?' Blake asked, hoisting an eyebrow at the relics of Avon's childhood. 

'Where else?' Avon said irritably. 'Consider it an act of redemption. I suspect that may be one of my main reasons for returning to this house.'

He stretched out full length on the bed - the opening move in a game they'd played before, where Blake stripped him with leisurely deliberation, pampering or teasing each successive centimetre of bared flesh, while Avon tried to remain impassive for as long as possible. Blake hesitated briefly before he began, wondering whether he wanted to play yet another Chesku game, then deciding to believe Avon's theory of redemption. He snapped studs: peeled black leather away from pale skin: sucked soft nipples till they were as sharp as tacks: lovingly traced swirls of dark hair from the chest down to the groin. By the time he snared the zipper tab between thumb and finger and gave a preliminary tug, Avon's hands had knotted into fists at his sides and his breath was rasping his throat. Blake grinned and took pity on him, releasing his cock and cradling his balls in one hand, while his other hand travelled slowly up the shaft.

'Harder,' Avon demanded, even earlier than he expected.

Blake's hand clenched and then slackened. 'Are you sure?' he asked.

'Yes, of course,' Avon snapped. 'You still don't understand, do you? I can't feel it, otherwise.' He tossed restlessly, averting his head and adding, almost inaudibly, 'And I want to feel it.'

The whispered words lodged in Blake's brain, as securely as if he'd already reserved a place for them. When he tightened his grip, squeezing shaft and balls, rubbing his thumb across the glistening cockhead, Avon sighed and relaxed and let his eyes slide shut. Blake gazed down at translucent eyelids, the flutter of long dark lashes and a mouth curving towards an enigmatic smile.

**All right, Avon, I think I understand at last. Having met your parents, I can see why ordinary levels of feeling mightn't come easy to you. Dear gods, it's lucky I didn't interpret all those requests for hard fucking as cues for a spot of recreational S&M.

I suspect you've already learnt more than enough about eroticised power plays.**

 

*

 

Avon smiled, signalling a change in tempo. As his cock swelled in Blake's hand, he pushed himself upright, nipping at an ear lobe, the angle of the jaw, the join between neck and shoulder. Blake flung his arms up in self-defence, then tried to grapple Avon close, but he ducked and evaded. Blake lunged for him and they rolled across the bed, tussling and wrestling until they were breathless with laughter, until the last lingering traces of the Chesku games had been purged from Avon's memory. 

When he sighed and stilled, Blake growled softly and drove his tongue past Avon's lips, so forcefully that for a moment he was convinced Blake had delved down to lick his heart. He made a small pained sound and Blake immediately pulled away, although the incipient concern in his eyes melted on contact with Avon's steady gaze.

'I love you, Kerr,' he said, as surprised and heartfelt as if it were the first time. 

'Yes,' Avon replied, obscurely definite. 'Oh yes, of course.'

He shifted sideways and surveyed Blake, who lay balanced on the fulcrum of his pelvis, ready to tilt back or forwards. Normally Avon liked the comfort of Blake's weight, holding him in place, but tonight he needed more freedom of movement, so he settled an imperious hand on Blake's shoulder and tilted him backwards. Blake's breath quickened. As his thighs spread receptively, Avon settled over him, letting his cock nudge the column of Blake's erection. Once he had aligned their shafts to his satisfaction, he braced his arms and started to rock his hips, eyes narrowed with the effort of maintaining contact. Having established the rhythm, he continued to slide to and fro, skimming across satin-smooth skin, varying the pace and pattern, until sensation blazed a trail along his neural pathways, so comprehensively that it blocked out any possibility of thought. 

'Avon!' Blake said abruptly, as though he had some urgent information to impart.

The sudden interruption startled Avon out of his sensual reverie. When he glanced down, he found himself staring into wide-open hazel eyes, focused with apprehensive rapture on impending orgasm. He laughed hectically and rode Blake as he bucked, revelling in the piston thrusts of Blake's thighs, tantalised by the come-and-go pressure on his cock. As sperm jetted warmly between them, Blake grunted and heaved, flipped Avon onto his back and bore down hard. Avon gasped and came, squirming luxuriantly against slippery muscle, shouting triumphantly when a skilful hand wrung the last drops from his pulsing cock. 

**One way or another, Blake knows how to handle me. It's unexpectedly agreeable to feel less than totally responsible for myself.** 

Some time later he opened his eyes and looked round at the churned sheets, the pillows littering the floor, Blake's garments draped untidily on the furniture, the lamp that one or other of them must have kicked over while they wrestled. The superheroes on the wall seemed to be smiling their approval at the ruin of his room's sterile tidiness. Avon frowned back, embarrassed by the banality of his teenage fantasies.

'In retrospect, it's not entirely surprising that my parents packed me off to a deprogrammer when I was fifteen,' he observed. 'I thought they were a little quick off the mark but in fact they had more reasons than one for their assessment.' He paused for a second, lifted his head and added, clear as a trumpet call, 'Although, as you see, your attempts to cure me of being queer had no lasting effects.'

Blake stirred beside him. 'Avon?' he said, drowsily puzzled. 'Who on earth are you talking to?'

'My father,' Avon explained. 'There will undoubtedly be other bugs in the room. I merely dismantled the most obvious one, as a token gesture.'

'Other bugs?' Blake yelped. 'You mean your parents will have tapes of ...?' 

'Yes, of course,' he said blandly. 'Don't worry, Roj. You were very good.'

Blake stared down in comical dismay at his naked torso, then burst out laughing. Avon subsided against him, lightheaded with relief. Introducing his lover into his parents' orbit had been a calculated risk but Blake had proceeded to break all the Chesku codes with the insouciance of a Zen master. While Blake's logic was often shaky, his instincts could always be relied on. Right at that moment, for example, he was gathering Avon into his arms with a fierce tenderness clearly induced by his mention of the deprogrammers, although Blake wasn't about to affront his reticence by putting that insight into words. Avon sighed and burrowed into the embrace, cushioning his head on Blake's broad chest, lulled by the steady reassurance of Blake's heartbeat.

While Blake's breathing slowed into its sleep rhythms, Avon let his mind drift back to the conversation in his father's study. Secure in Blake's arms, he was, paradoxically, able to admit that he'd been tempted by the deal Ivor had offered. It was a gratifying form of revenge to hear his father say, 'Your brother Mikel's a disappointment. After all I've done for him, he seems unlikely to rise beyond the rank of Councillor. Perhaps I got rid of you too quickly.' Avon smiled at the belated vindication and indulged a fantasy of his other self - Ivor Gilles Kirconnell Chesku, restored to full Alpha Elite privileges, being groomed for high office under his father's patronage. The Alpha Elite might be devious, detached and incorrigibly manipulative but, despite the pain his parents had caused him, he felt at home here, as he had never felt at home on Liberator.

**And yet ... and yet I feel safe with Blake, even under my father's roof, even given Blake's undeniable propensity for getting people killed. Could I walk away from that?

Not easily, I'm afraid.**

As Blake mumbled in his sleep, slinging an arm out to hitch him closer, Avon rolled deftly sideways and tucked a pillow into Blake's grasp. He stood and gazed down at Blake, memorising the dreamy pout of his lower lip and the crease between his eyebrows, always deeper when he was sleeping. Then he turned away, dressed speedily and activated the computer on his desk. A swift scan of the files; a subdued smile of triumph when he discovered that his encryptions had survived the past two decades; a silent hunt for a thumbnail-sized chip to record the data. Avon palmed the chip, paused for a last look at Blake and padded barefoot out into the corridor and down the stairs.

The front hall opened around him, high and shadowy as an underground cavern. Avon sauntered across to the door of the anteroom and leaned against the frame, inserting a finger into the crack where he used to hide his pornovid chips from Tench. He smiled reminiscently - **everything changes: everything stays the same** - and drifted on to his mother's drawing room. More memories. He'd fucked Anna for the first time on one of those over-stuffed couches, her silvergilt hair catching on the purple velvet, both of them made more ardent and eager by the knowledge that Mikel or Sarinda might walk in at any moment.

**If only Anna had survived. She matched me perfectly. She understood the Chesku ethos, as Blake never could. Her only flaw was her gender but then, we would hardly have been obliged to remain monogamous. We might be living together in adequate splendour on one of the more civilised frontier planets, if only the bank fraud had succeeded, if only she had survived ...**

Grief and guilt tugged his mouth down, erasing the remnants of his smile. Avon swung away and paced across to the library - one of his mother's more expensive affectations, an entire wall lined with antique paper-books. He switched a light on and browsed the shelves, selecting some of his childhood favourites and reading a line here, a paragraph there. At the end of one shelf, a space had been cleared for a group of family holos - his father, imposing in the black and silver uniform of the Justice Department; his mother at a family gathering, competing with Servalan for the camera's attention. Apparently, Mikel was too far out of favour to warrant inclusion, although, when Avon looked closer, he spotted the corner of another xenite frame, protruding from behind the books. He levered the holo out and turned it over.

And Anna Grant gazed up at him, serenely knowing, dressed in white like a ghost-bride.

Avon's eyes blurred. He gripped the frame, letting a sharp corner dig into his palm, until his hand stopped shaking. Then he focused more steadily on the holo and gasped in muted surprise. Anna wasn't alone. His brother Mikel stood beside her, in the traditional black skinsuit of a bridegroom.

Synapses sparked across Avon's brain, making connections faster than logic could process them. He laughed, appreciating the irony. Obviously, Anna understood the Chesku ethos far better than Ivor Gilles Kirconnell Chesku ever had. She must have bargained with his father, offering to dispatch his inconvenient second son, in return for the Cheskus' acceptance of her marriage with Mikel.

**So much for that little dream. I should have known there are no easy escape routes, where my family is concerned.**

He was still staring down at Anna's ethereal face when the floorboards vibrated beneath his feet. Avon turned and saw his father looming against the light, a few metres away.

'I don't need much sleep either,' Ivor told him. 'I had a feeling you'd be sneaking around the place. It occurs to me that you might be equivocating about my offer because you don't think I can implement it. Trust me, Kerr, I still have more than enough power to reverse your dismissal from the Elite and shut your cousin Servalan's mouth.' He waited for an impatient half-second, then snapped, 'Well? Have you made up your mind yet?'

Avon restored the holo to the centre of the cluster. 'Your timing is as impeccable as always,' he observed. 'I had just this moment decided to decline.'

'Because of Mikel's whore?' Ivor said astutely. 'You could have her, you know. She sells to the highest bidder.' His mouth quirked into a raffish grin and he added, 'Yes, I agree. Not a particularly enticing option - but you can do better than that skinny spy-girl. Hell, you could hire a troop of Delta musclemen as bedwarmers, providing you're prepared to compromise, for once in your intransigent life, and marry some Elite bitch to keep up appearances.'

'As you did?' Avon asked and watched his father's eyes light with feral anger. 

'Careful, Kerr,' he warned. 'You're about to make one of your biggest mistakes. You really should consider staying. At least you'd be safe, under Chesku protection. You'll never be safe with **him**.'

'That depends on one's definition of safety,' Avon pointed out. 'Besides, there are other factors to consider. After all, I love Blake ... quite as much as I hate you.'

Ivor shrugged. 'I hated my father too. But he made me what I am.'

'Well now, perhaps I prefer not to become what you would make me,' Avon murmured. 'Good night, ex-Minister Chesku.'

He strolled towards his father, outwardly determined, inwardly apprehensive. At the last possible second, Ivor snorted like a stallion and gave ground. Avon brushed past him, controlling a shudder at the tangential contact, and strode out into the hall. As he climbed the stairs, he could feel his father's gaze, marking his back like a target, but he refused to turn his head.

**It is finished now. I am free of him. At last.** 

He stumbled into the bedroom, tore off his clothes and collapsed beside Blake, sinking straight into a sleep as deep and dreamless as if he had been drugged or stunned. When he opened his eyes some time later, Avon had no idea of where he was, although his hands, less uncertain than the rest of him, were already searching for Blake and finding the bed empty. As he prepared to panic, he heard Blake's voice, oddly distorted.

'Awake at last? I would've fetched you a cup of coffee, if I hadn't been afraid Tench might've boobytrapped the kitchen.'

Avon propped himself on one elbow, passing a hand across his face, to make sure he hadn't aged a hundred years during the night. Upsidedown hazel eyes gleamed back at him. Blake bent at the waist, reversed his shoulder stand and sat up, curls buoyant from the shower, cheeks immaculate from the shaver unit. Avon smiled ruefully.

**And the room has been restored to sterile tidiness as well. Oh dear, Roj must have been very bored.**

'Time for breakfast, I suppose,' Blake said, scrambling to his feet. 'What kind of ordeal will your parents have organised this time?'

'Nothing that need concern you,' Avon told him. 'We won't be staying.'

Blake let out a cautious sigh of relief, gathering momentum as he decided that Avon meant it. 'I can't say I'm sorry,' he admitted. 'Your parents' idea of hospitality reminds me of the Justice Department's preliminary interrogations.' He took a closer look at Avon, frowned and came to sit beside him, tucking an arm around his shoulders and saying, 'Are you all right, love?'

'I will be,' Avon said. 'Just get me out of here.'

He leaned against Blake for a few restorative seconds, before dragging himself to the bathroom and splashing cold water over his face and torso. Blake dressed him like a valet, fastening his studs and smoothing his leather tunic, then kissed him lightly on the forehead and shepherded him downstairs. As Avon headed across to the anteroom, the hairs at the nape of his neck prickled in warning. He turned and saw Ivor, Sarinda and Tench, clustered together by the library door.

'Kerr, darling,' his mother fluted reproachfully, 'don't tell me you were planning to leave without saying goodbye?'

'Or without submitting to the standard stripsearch, to prove neither of you are taking anything that doesn't belong to you,' his father added in bureaucratic mode.

Avon tensed. 'I agreed to a search,' he stated. 'I did not agree to a stripsearch.'

Sarinda studied him through a butterfly flutter of long lashes. 'No, you didn't,' she murmured. 'But I think you'll concede that it's in your best interests to cooperate.'

Her hand swung up, finger clenched on the trigger of a small pearl-inlaid laser gun. As Avon stared blankly, Ivor Chesku slapped his thigh and roared with laughter.

'Got you there,' he said jovially. 'You perverts always underestimate women. I gave my word that I wouldn't touch any weapons ... but you forgot to extract the same promise from your mother.'

'True,' Avon admitted. 'Still, despite her general lack of maternal instincts, I somehow doubt that Mother would be prepared to shoot me.'

'You're quite right, darling,' Sarinda purred. 'That's why I'm aiming at your barbarian. Nothing personal, Roj dear. As a matter of fact, I rather like you, so I hope you're bright enough to believe I'm an excellent shot, without requiring me to prove it.'

Morning sun dazzled the windows, laying strips of light across the polished floor. Avon blinked, to clear his eyes, and focused on the tiny black death-dealing circle, held steady in his mother's hand. He should have been computing the odds but he felt strangely lethargic, more inclined to collapse into one of the high-backed chairs near the door than to initiate some daring rescue. As he wavered, Ivor grinned and rubbed his hands.

'Check and mate,' he said with relish. 'Into the anteroom, Blake, and drop your trousers.'

Avon turned, silently apologetic, and met an affirming smile. 'Easy, love,' Blake said. 'Your father's obviously been reduced to playing kindergarten games in his retirement but I don't mind indulging him. After all, we've got nothing to hide.'

He strode through the doorway and started to strip, as efficient and unworried as if he were preparing for a medical examination. Avon shivered and averted his eyes, to escape a sudden image of Blake in Federation custody, stripping for the psychosurgeons who'd studied him and then wiped his memories. 

**Ah well, I suppose Blake has endured worse than this, although I can't say I find that thought particularly consoling.**

As he looked up, his mother went gliding past, eyes wide with unfeigned admiration. 'A well-endowed barbarian,' she said, running the point of her tongue across scarlet lips. 'Really, Roj, you make this more of a pleasure than a duty. Now, if you'll prop your hands against the wall and spread your legs ... There, that wasn't so bad, was it? You can get dressed now. Kerr, it's your turn next - and don't forget, any sign of resistance means a laser scar on that rather attractive body of Roj's.'

The air seemed to thicken and curdle. Ivor gripped Avon's shoulder and marched him into the anteroom, with Tench shambling behind. Avon's hands lifted, as slowly as if they were pushing through deep water, to unfasten the studs that Blake had fastened only minutes before. He couldn't look at Blake but he was aware of his lover's brooding presence, shadowy at the edge of his vision, caged behind the sightline of Sarinda's gun.

**How Blake must despise me for submitting without protest to this ritual humiliation. Unfortunately, I can neither break my word nor risk Blake's life, merely to avoid embarrassment - and, to look on the bright side, Blake can hardly despise me more than I despise myself.**

By the time he eased his trousers down, Avon had achieved an almost total detachment from his body - a trick learned in his youth that had often proved useful since then, although never more so than now. He watched unmoved while Ivor scanned his nakedness, tracking the slow passage of his father's yellow eyes, noting the triumphant rise and fall of his father's chest.

'Up against the wall,' Ivor ordered and Avon obeyed, hands spread, feet apart. He was gazing dreamily at the bronze flecks in the wall hangings when his father added, 'Go on, Tench. Do your stuff.'

A sharp snap of latex and a muffled shout from Blake. 'Hold on,' he protested. 'That wasn't in the agreement.'

'Oh, it's a customary part of a stripsearch,' Ivor said amiably. 'Consult the troopers' training manual, if you don't believe me - but, of course, you don't recognise Federation authority, do you? Never mind, there's no need to get too hot and bothered on my son's behalf. I assure you, Blake, Kerr's had a lot of experience in ... ah, that area.'

Avon froze, belatedly realising what his father intended. A wave of anticipatory nausea wrenched his guts and then he vacated his body completely, letting his consciousness float up to the ceiling and bob there like a party balloon, while Tench fumbled for his buttocks, inserted a gloved hand and shoved. The butler muttered and cursed and forced two fingers past the resistant valve, probing the anus with short swift stabs that would have been intolerably painful, if Avon had allowed himself to register pain. His father chuckled and moved closer.

'Does he still have a nice tight little arse?' he asked.

Tench grunted. 'It's tight enough, Master Ivor. Nothing nice about it, though, not from where I'm bloody standing.'

His knobby fingers jabbed deeper and then spread wide. Avon heard a soft despairing groan. As he searched for some way of reassuring Blake, he realised that the groan had been forced from his own lungs. He was back in his body again, trying to control its wracking tremors, bracing himself against the onslaught of hurt and shame. 

'All right, that's enough,' Sarinda snapped. 'Leave it, Tench. Kerr, put your clothes on and join us in the hall.'

Footsteps clattered across the **faux marbre** floor. Alone in the anteroom, Avon retched and wiped his eyes and dressed himself, numb fingers fumbling every stud. Before he had time to think or react, he limped across to the doorway and slumped against the frame, clutching it tightly, as though he would have fallen without its support.

'Well?' he asked. 'Have you finished with us now?'

His father laughed, a high-pitched yowl of excitement. 'Raise the force sphere, Kerr,' he challenged, canted forward like a hound straining against the leash. 'Let's see whether you get away - or whether my guards get you first.'

He went loping towards the main door but Sarinda skimmed across the hall and intercepted him. 'Sorry, darling,' she murmured, as her gun rammed into Ivor's midriff. 'The game's over now. Goodbye, Kerr. We won't meet again - oh, and Roj dear, do take care of him.'

Avon reached into his pocket, thumbing the unit that operated the force sphere. 'Goodbye, Mother,' he said, polite and affectless. 'Rot in hell, Father.'

As Ivor swung back, baring his teeth, Blake activated his bracelet and yelled, 'Teleport now.' The hall hazed and the teleport bay shimmered into existence around them, with Vila frowning anxiously from the control panel.

'Hope you had a nice stay with your folks,' he said. 'Only, we spotted some big burly men hanging round outside the house, so we wondered whether you were in trouble.'

Before Avon could answer, Cally, Jenna and Gan appeared in the corridor, all talking at once. 

'... sensed an intense hostility, hovering over ...' 

'... make sure we have a back-up plan, next time you ...' 

'... mightn't feel like part of the team but we don't want to lose you, Avon.'

Their concern was oddly gratifying but Avon felt unprepared to deal with it. He took a step forward, intending to push past them and retreat to his cabin, but since he was still somewhat detached from his body, he misjudged the distance and collided with the teleport desk. His expression must have been less guarded than usual, because the others instantly crowded around him, offering support (Gan), comfort (Cally), a bracing grin (Jenna) and a glass of soma and adrenalin (Vila, naturally). It was well-meant but Avon was relieved when Blake waved them away, rescuing him from all that claustrophobic attention. 

'Sorry, Avon and I are both done in,' he said. 'Would you mind waiting for the full story? I think we need a rest and some debriefing first.'

A murmur of slightly regretful assent and then Blake was ushering Avon down the corridor and steering him into his cabin. 'Well, that was interesting,' he said, as the door closed. 'You were right, Avon. Your family definitely qualifies for the term "dysfunctional".' He leaned back against the wall, folding his arms across his chest and adding, 'By the way, how old were you when your father raped you?'

'Oh, so you worked that out?' Avon said, mildly surprised. 'Congratulations, Blake. I was fifteen years old at the point where my father caught me in bed with a schoolmate. I believe his exact words were, "If you can do it with him, you can do it with me." He then proceeded to test the truth of that axiom for the next three months. Quite publicly, as a matter of fact - he took me everywhere he went, as his consort.'

'He what?' Blake exploded. 'For Christ's sake, Avon! Is that sort of thing common among the Elite?' 

'Not precisely,' Avon told him. 'The Alpha Elite have all the usual taboos against father-son incest. However, breaking taboos - and getting away with it - is the quickest way to enhance one's Elite status. Any Elites who looked shocked or protested when my father fondled me at social functions would have suffered a considerable loss of prestige among their peers. If you consider me proficient at ignoring other people's reactions, remember that I had good teachers.' 

Blake sat down on the end of the bed, as suddenly as if he had been knee-capped. 'And your mother?' he asked hoarsely. 

'Is herself a member of the Elite,' Avon completed. 'She is also what they call "a one-man woman" - and unfortunately, the man in question happens to be my father. I was rather startled when she turned the gun on him, at the end there. It's most unlike her to deny him anything he wants.'

He swayed slightly, giddy with exhaustion, and dropped into the chair by Blake's desk. Silence settled over the cabin, heavy and suffocating. Avon watched the toe of his boot swing back and forth, regular as a metronome, an activity that struck him as infinitely preferable to the option of raising his head and testing Blake's reaction. It seemed poignantly unfair that, just when he had abandoned the last of his illusions about his parents and their daughter-in-law, he was compelled to risk alienating Blake by the disclosure of his sordid history. Still, he had set this course of events in action when he elected to bring Blake to his parents' house. At some level of his psyche, he apparently wanted Blake to know everything, so he might as well answer Blake's questions and be done with it.

'And at the end of three months?' Blake said, on cue.

'At the end of three months I behaved ... unacceptably at a state banquet,' Avon replied. 'My hysterical outburst might have caused my father to lose face, if he hadn't instantly had me committed to a luxurious private establishment, run by Federation deprogrammers.' 

'Wasn't that regarded as hypocritical?' Blake asked, terse and strained. 

'No,' Avon said. 'You're missing the point, Blake. My father's dislike of homosexuality was well-known in Elite circles. If his opinions on that subject hadn't been so vehement, his taboo-breaking would not have been so dramatically effective.'

The bed frame twanged as Blake shifted restlessly. 'I see,' he muttered. 'But the deprogramming failed?'

'Obviously,' Avon sighed. 'On the day I was released from the luxurious private establishment, I went straight to a queer bar recommended by one of the orderlies - although, as an assetless member of a rich family, I considered it advisable to conceal my backsliding from my parents. Over the next decade I completed four degrees at New London university, while at the same time I fucked my way around the bar scene and the fringes of Elite society. Oh yes, Blake, there are queers among the Elite - but it is, of course, a secret network, unregenerate queerness being as despised as my father's effrontery was admired.'

He paused and waited for a stirring denunciation of Elite closetry. When Blake remained silent, Avon hitched himself higher, wedging the chairback under his shoulder blades to hold himself upright, as he launched into the final chapter of his story.

'In my late twenties, I was arrested for - well, for resisting arrest during a routine investigation into a queer bar. My father arranged my release, on condition that I returned to the deprogrammers and that, if I embarrassed the family a third time, I would resign all claim to any Chesku inheritance. So I knew what I was doing when I seduced - or, I should say, let Anna Grant seduce me. When she suggested defrauding the Federation bank, it struck me as a marvellous revenge on the society that had effectively neutered me - although, ironically, I now suspect that she used the proceeds to bribe her way into the Chesku family ... and that my father used his share to obliterate me from all Federation records, so comprehensively that even the Minister for Justice could not access my new name.' 

He paused, still perversely stung by his disenfranchisement, and tried to think of a suitable epigraph. To his horror, Avon found himself possessed by an urgent desire to fall on his knees and beg Blake for - what? Understanding? Forgiveness? Absolution? Grand concepts but, ultimately, as irrelevant as the gesture itself. 

**There is still too much of the Elite in my nature to let me plead successfully. Desperation only works if it appears sincere - an impossible achievement, when one has learnt calculation in the cradle.**

Instead, he steepled his hands together, to hide their betraying tremor. 'So now you know what you are dealing with,' he said, cold and clear. 'Damaged goods, Blake. Very damaged goods.'

A dull echo bounced the words off the walls and threw them back at him. When Avon forced his eyes to lift and focus, Blake was staring morosely at the floor, shoulders slumped, full mouth dragged down into a bitter curve. Avon studied him with valedictory affection and then bowed his head, resigned to the imminence of loss. 

**Yes, well, what else did I expect? I set this up, after all. Better to be rejected now than later.**

As he prepared to rise and leave, Blake looked up with a grin that transformed his sullen scowl. 'Damaged goods?' he said. 'Sorry, Avon, I was brought up by a pair of neoMarxist-Lacanians. I don't go in for that kind of metaphor.'

Hope ripped Avon's resignation apart, with a force that was physically painful. 'Really?' he asked, catching his breath. 'What would you say instead?' 

 

*

 

Blake clasped his hands behind his neck and stretched till his joints cracked. It had been an effort to hold back for so long but he'd been reluctant to say too much or react too strongly, in case he distracted Avon from his narrative. He wanted to hear all of it and, even more importantly, he suspected Avon needed to tell all of it. 

**But now, thank heavens, I get a chance to add my own opinions.**

'As you've often pointed out, I have a tendency to slip into revolutionary rhetoric,' he said ruefully. 'I'd probably start talking about heroic struggle and resistance.'

He turned to share the joke and found himself confronted by an incredulous stare. 'So you consider that a story of heroic resistance, rather than mercenary collusion?' Avon inquired. 

'Yes, of course,' Blake said energetically. 'I don't know how you survived it - or how you still had the courage to kiss me, that night on the flight deck. It was braver than anything I've ever done. I spent years ranting about freedom, without freeing myself from Cymry IV's implicit homophobia. You were systematically abused by a repressed queer and his accomplice and yet you never lost sight of who you were.'

'A repressed queer and his accomplice?' Avon mused. 'You're referring to my parents, I presume. A somewhat idiosyncratic point of view, Blake.'

'In Elite terms, maybe,' he agreed. 'However, I don't buy your father's rather convoluted line about fucking you to test his peers. How do you see it, Avon?'

Avon tilted his head to one side, considering the question. 'Well now, I have been told for most of my life that I was a disappointment to my parents,' he offered.

Blake smiled back, overtly sardonic. 'Oh, I'm sure the feeling's mutual,' he replied.

He watched Avon's eyes open wide, then narrow with amusement. 'What made me think you'd be unable to cope with those revelations?' he wondered. 'Nothing shocks you, does it, Blake?'

'On the contrary,' Blake said, more forcefully than he intended. 'Your father shocks me to the marrow. I wanted to take him by the throat and choke him, very slowly - wanted it more than I've wanted anything, since I fantasised about killing my Federation torturers.' He glanced at his clenched fists and uncurled his fingers, one by one, adding, 'Then again, I can't see why you'd be interested in hearing about my reactions, when you already have to deal with your own.' 

'How astute of you,' Avon murmured. 'Still, it may console you to know that I brought the means for revenge away with me. While I lived under my parents' roof, I entertained myself by compiling a dossier on the more blatantly illegal activities of my father and his colleagues. If it is made public, I think you can rely on an extended period of chaos in the Federation's upper ranks. I stored the data in my childhood computer, hoping it might be exempt from the usual surveillance. Last night I downloaded it, concealed the chip in a crack beside the anteroom door and retrieved it this morning, while -'

'While your father thought you were devastated by his bloody stripsearch,' Blake breathed. 'That's brilliant, sweetheart! Show me.'

Avon hesitated and then came to perch on the bed beside him, opening his hand. Blake stared down at a thumbnail-sized chip, embedded deep in Avon's palm by the force of his grasp. As he reached out to prise the chip free, Avon involuntarily jerked his hand away, although seconds later he muttered an apology and slumped against Blake's side, shivering uncontrollably. It seemed unlike him to let his reactions show so clearly but, after considering the matter, Blake decided Avon wasn't aware that he was shaking.

'Having second thoughts?' he asked gently. 'I gather you don't want to expose your father.'

'Apparently not,' Avon admitted. 'I can't understand why. It's really quite illogical.' 

'Only by Chesku standards,' Blake said with a grin. 'Most people take some degree of family feeling for granted, even when their family's less than functional. Never mind, love, there's a simple solution. Delete the information about Minister Chesku and publicise the rest. All right, there's still a chance that your father'll be implicated by his colleagues - but if so, that's his responsibility, not yours.' 

Avon stared at him blankly for a moment, then flung his head back in one of his rare unaffected bursts of laughter. 'My hero,' he gasped finally. 'A veritable Alexander, cutting the Gordian knot. Don't scowl at me, fearless leader. I shall explain that reference later. Right now, I have better things to do.'

He stood up and began to strip methodically, tossing his clothes onto the floor and trampling over them on his way to the shower unit. A few seconds later Blake heard a rush of water and saw wisps of steam seeping under the door.

**Oh yes, of course. A symbolic cleansing. That makes sense, under the circumstances.**

To assist with the symbolism, he gathered up Avon's clothes and stuffed them into the laundry chute, then dimmed the lights and started to undress. As he turned down the bedcovers, a minnow-flash of light whisked through the shadows - Avon, ducking under his arm and dropping onto the bed, hands lifting in welcome, legs splayed wide. Blake lowered himself into the remaining triangle of space and frowned down doubtfully.

'There's no need to be concerned,' Avon informed him. 'I was not torn by Tench, only bruised.'

When Blake remained hesitant, he glanced sidelong through a screen of lashes and whispered, 'Please, Roj,' which was unusual enough to send Blake's hand reaching for a tube of gel, against his better judgment. After the emotional turmoil of the last few hours, he assumed he'd need to work for an erection but his cock seemed to be focused on the present, rather than the past - or, more specifically, on Avon, currently engaged in tucking a pillow under his hips to hoist his arse higher, indicating quite unambiguously that, for the first time, he wanted to be fucked face to face.

Blake's pulse quickened. He slathered his stiffening shaft with gel and positioned his cockhead meticulously, nudging the soft dimple between Avon's buttocks. Avon's legs lifted instantly; Avon's heels hooked over his shoulders, urging him closer. Blake ran his eyes down the slant of a dark-furred torso, still rosy from the heat of the shower, then leaned forward to kiss the damp tendrils at Avon's temples, letting his cock sink, by slow and cautious degrees, into Avon's arse. Avon gasped sharply and bit his lip, so Blake held still, giving him time to adjust and settle, admiring his gallant determination to transcend the pain. Words came spilling out of him, random but heartfelt. 

'My dearest love,' he crooned. 'Bravest of Alphas. I love you so much, Kerr. You make me very happy. I want to make you happy too.' 

'Really?' Avon said, alert and interested. 'Will you give me the Liberator?'

'No,' Blake said, jolted out of his dreamy trance. 'Of course not. Why do you ask?'

'Just testing,' Avon told him. 'I thought that little speech was hyperbole but I gather I'm supposed to believe it.' 

Blake shrugged. 'Believe whatever you like, sweetheart. As long as you remember that I believe in you.'

Avon's eyes darkened. 'Be careful, Blake,' he warned. 'I can't change. I am what my parents made me. You will undoubtedly catch glimpses of them in me from time to time.'

'That's all right,' Blake said comfortably. 'I fell for a devious, manipulative bastard. It's quite consoling to know you could be a lot worse.'

Avon tugged his mouth down, trying to suppress a smile, but the cat's whisker creases at the corners of his eyes betrayed him. In the end he abandoned the struggle and laughed out loud, muscles clenching tight around the base of Blake's shaft. Blake moaned and thrust, felt Avon wince and thrust again more carefully - a gentle rocking motion, repeated over and over, until his vision blurred and motes of light spangled his eyelashes, casting a golden glamour across Avon's face. He hung suspended, absorbed in the shadow play of Avon's changing expressions, exulting in the rhythmic contractions timed to the slow friction of his cock. 

The slight, controlled movements had a hypnotic effect, heightening his perceptions and alerting him to the minutest variations in texture. When Avon sighed soundlessly and arched his pelvis, the imprint of his erection marked Blake's sensitised skin like a brand. He reared back to take possession of Avon's cock but Avon shook his head in silent protest and pulled him down, welding them together. Blake closed his eyes and saw, with hallucinatory clarity, Avon's cock pulsing between their bellies, his cock buried in Avon's arse, both moving to the same inexorable tempo. They cried out simultaneously, shuddered and stilled, clutched each other and collapsed in a sweaty heap.

After a drowsy interval Blake disentangled himself, looped an arm round Avon and fitted him against his side. Although his body still felt languid and sated, his mind was already ranging back over the last hour, pondering Avon's instant acceptance of his simple solution, remembering how Avon had been prepared to indict his father for what was essentially Blake's cause. 

**He finally trusts me as much as I trust him. Or perhaps even more, by now. It's time to up the ante.** 

'There's something I ought to tell you,' he announced, hitching himself higher on the pillows. 'I've been working on a plan to -' 

'Yes, I know,' Avon sighed. 

'You do?' Blake said, startled. 'How?' 

Avon laughed. 'You're fairly transparent, my dear. If you want to maintain any kind of secrecy, you'll need to watch that habit of gnawing your knuckles, when you're keeping something to yourself. What is it this time?' 

'I've been collecting information about the computer complex that monitors all the Federation's political, civil and military activity,' Blake confessed. 'I know where Central Control is - in an underground compound on Earth - and I think I know how to bypass its defences.' 

'Then think again,' Avon told him. 'If this compound is so easy to find, it clearly isn't the right place.' 

'So we have to look for a place we can't find? That might prove a little difficult.' 

'True, but Orac and I can do it. And once we locate Central Control, what  
next?'  
'We set up a council to organise the release of all the subject planets from Federation control,' Blake said promptly. 'I'll suggest we start with the most independent planets like Albian and Helotrix, to set a precedent for self-determination, and we might make general elections a condition of our assistance. If the Federation's already preoccupied - say, as the result of a well-timed scandal in their upper echelons - we should be able to restore galactic autonomy within a year.' 

Avon nodded approval. 'An excellent idea,' he agreed. 'I was worried that your scruples about the corrupting effects of power might convince you that it would be simpler to blow up Central Control.'

Blake grinned. 'Oh, I think I can resist corruption for a year or so,' he said cheerfully. 

Beside him, Avon stirred and shifted, butting his head into the crook of Blake's arm. 'I didn't imagine you'd need to guard against your own corruptibility,' he said in a muffled voice. 'You might, however, be concerned about the effect of absolute power on my father's son.'

'Hardly,' Blake said spontaneously. 'You know more about the dangers of absolute power than I do.'

He reached down to smooth Avon's hair, combing the damp tangles with his fingers, massaging cable-taut neck muscles. As he stroked and kneaded, the rigid angle of Avon's shoulder gradually softened into a reasonable facsimile of relaxation. He yawned and stretched, latching onto Blake's hand. 

'I love you, Roj,' he murmured. 'You are aware of that, aren't you?' 

'I **had** guessed,' Blake admitted. 'Still, it's nice to hear you say it.' 

'Oh, good,' Avon said sleepily. 'In that case, I might tell you again in a few years' time.' 

Blake stiffened indignantly but seconds later, he realised that, in his own inimitable fashion, his tortuous beloved had just informed him that he saw their relationship as a longterm proposition. He leaned forward, noting a wary flutter of eyelashes against Avon's cheek, and deliberately ruffled the hair that he'd just smoothed.

'Thank you, Avon,' he said blandly. 'I shall look forward to that.'


End file.
